How Product Hunt really works

One of my products was featured on product hunt in it's early days (no idea who submitted it). I remember thinking then - "well, cool, but people looking for new products are not really my target market."

Has anyone seen any value come from PH?

I imagine it's mostly for companies looking to attract investors, not customers.

Maybe it has replaced TechCrunch in this role.

Same experience as you, someone I don't know posted my app to product hunt. I have no idea what would motivate them to do this (I'm not a product hunt user.) The reason I noticed was because I was searching for the reason that app sales spiked.

Real value? Sales increased a few thousand percent for one day.

The only thing that bothers me about PH is one of my products was one of the most upvoted products of all time there in the early days, but I didn't submit it. It would likely get that status again (it's quite popular among the PH type crowd) if posted now when they have 100x the audience, but it can't be posted again. I find that unfortunate, HN lets you repost links after some period of time I believe for 2.0 releases, etc.

I've gotten great value out of the PH postings that went well (quality users / feedback). For me PH is more democratic than, say, a PR outlet where it is completely up to the discretion of the person I'm pitching to feature me or not.

I've had some submissions tank and not make it out of upcoming and had others make it to the top. The goal with PH seems to be to make sure quality stuff is making it to the top and they seem to do a decent job of that (not all the top submissions are some VC backed product with advisors pimping them, mine is bootstrapped and I posted them myself).

You're never going to make everyone happy but I'm sure they will continue to do more to give people a voice without destroying the community.

We've put https://segment.com/academy on PH (an email course on growth and analytics) and has seen some great traction amongst that community. It certainly is a specific audience, but the traffic is pretty good.

I am pretty sure you can resubmit to PH when you have a new version, especially if you had a great run with your first version.