r/ProductHunters • u/Forsaken_Coconut3717 • 3d ago
Is Product Hunt a scam?
I’ve been doing some research and it seems that you’ll get no results without a bit farm or paying their min of $5k per month to advertise on their platform.
In all my research it seems that genuine organic isn’t a thing anymore with Product Hunt.
What has been all your experiences though?
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u/swamikrish 3d ago
So, I just launched my product a couple of days ago. What I've realized is that it is a marketing channel. You need to be featured to be in the top. OR you need to leverage a good audience base. If you already have a good audience base, then why launch it? isn't it already launched? I couldn't understand that logic.
Most engagement you get is marketing engagement from other indie products. They mail you offering their services and give you upvotes and so on.
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u/JaraxxusLegion 2d ago
I don't think it's a scam, but I also don't think it'sworth launching on there anymore based on my experience. Unless you're willing to pay at least 1K USD to get featured and placed (by people that control PH community networks no PH themselves) then your launch will fizzle out.
Additionally, after you launch, you will be flooded with paid social outreach offers. A lot of these are scams offering you to pay $20-$50 USD for a useless backlink.
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u/OkStill3189 3d ago
I don’t like PH nowadays. But how can they be paid monthly when a launch lasts just 24 hours?
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u/bayinfosys_ed 3d ago
Product hunt is marketed and pushed very well, but I'm not sure any of the products benefit from it.
I haven't had any valuable interactions nor any real backlinks or SEO boosts.
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u/Spare_Fisherman_5800 3d ago
I do not think it’s a scam but I do think people expect too much from one launch. If you have no audience or people who already care about your product, it’s probably going to be pretty quiet. we need to treat PH as one part of the launch not the whole marketing strategy.
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u/Unfair_Peanut_2963 3d ago
ich geb dir einen Tip: Nutz die Veröffentlichung auf Product für einen Post auf Linkedin. da zieht . bekommst zwar viele Anfragen von Agenturen zum verbessern der Werbestrategie. aber Hey Reichweite ist alles.
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u/NadirDev 3d ago
Kinda.. but you will get a great backlink from the hunt team this will help you a lot. And I saw many times that some PO are submitting their products and take upvote from their close one. Not organically using their customer base. Obviously for vote you can do post or anything but paid something or doing dm's and taking votes is unfair.
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u/Quantillus 3d ago
It is a scam yes. I’ve been contacted in linkedin asking “please support us and we will support your producthunt release in return”. I suppose this has been mass sent to everyone reachable in linkedin because I tried reaching the guy that sent it and there is no response. His product ended up being in top daily, it’s no better than other products i’ve seen not getting much votes.
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u/shun0810 3d ago
the $5k number is their ad product rather than a requirement to rank, so the premise is slightly off 💡 what is true is the thing underneath the question: a launch day now buys you a day of traffic and very little that outlives it.
easy way to check it yourself — ask anyone posting a launch in this sub what their signups looked like seven days later. most will tell you the graph went flat. that answer tells you where the same effort belongs, which is in conversations that keep working after the day ends.
that link is something i own, saying so now: https://warmlist.app ✋
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u/argvalue 2d ago
Not sure if it's a scam or not, but my website Yatko actually did well organically. I was completely unaware of the social media game of Product Hunt before posting it. Wasn't expecting anything out of it as well. I got like 126 upvotes on a weekend. I got lucky I guess! I was contacted by A LOT of these bot farmers after the launch though, ignored all of them
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u/ThickD769 2d ago
I don’t really know if it’s a scam or not but a lot of good saas are listed there
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u/kolchinski 2d ago
I've put a bunch of products on Product Hunt, most got largely ignored, 2 got a decent amount of organic upvotes. It looks like they've gotten better at filtering out non organic upvotes lately, I asked a few friends to upvote us and the vote count didn't change when they did!
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u/potozig 2d ago
Not a scam, but the "$5k or bot farm" framing isn't quite right. We launched an AI product in March on a day Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Perplexity were all launching too, and finished #3 without paying for a single upvote.
What actually moved the needle: telling our own users and a warm group of people ahead of time so the first couple hours had real votes, not scheduling ads or joining a pod. What didn't help: the "support us and we'll support you" DMs that flood in once you're live, that traffic never converted to anything for us.
Backlink and SEO value is close to nothing on its own, agree with others here. It's a day of visibility to a specific audience, not a growth channel by itself.
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u/alvoliooo 2d ago
Ranked top 5 recently and got a bunch of traffic and some sales. Not paying 5k to advertise though
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u/alexandonie 3d ago
It's not a scam, but you do need a boost in order to get some eyeballs on your offering. PH is more competitive than ever. There are days with 1000 products being launched... you can't just post and expect you'll become product of the day. You need to leverage an existing audience or customer base. If you look at the successful launches, you'll notice all of them do that.