Hacker Remix

Show HN: I built a fair alternative to Product Hunt for indie makers

243 points by lakshikag 3 days ago | 105 comments

I’m an indie maker, just like many of you. A few months back, I launched a product on one of the big platforms, and... nothing. It got buried under dozens of other launches within hours. All that work, all that excitement is gone in the blink of an eye. No one even saw it.

It stung. I wasn’t mad, well, maybe a little but mostly, I just felt invisible. The truth is, indie makers like me don’t have big teams or budgets to fight for visibility. We rely on genuine support and connections. I couldn’t stop thinking about how many great ideas never get the attention they deserve because they’re overshadowed.

So, I decided to build something different: https://itslaunched.com

Here’s the idea:

• 10 launches per day, max. Limiting the number of daily launches ensures that every product gets its moment in the spotlight.

• 2 votes per user, per day. This isn’t a popularity contest. You only get two votes, so people have to really think about which products they want to support. It’s quality over quantity.

• “Under Radar” feature. This one’s my favorite. If a product doesn’t get much love on its launch day, it gets a second chance to shine the next day. Because timing shouldn’t be the only thing standing between you and success.

There’s more like badges, comments, streaks but the heart of it is simple: a fair shot for indie makers.

I built this because I believe every product deserves to be seen, especially the ones built by solo makers and small teams putting their heart into something they truly care about. And I didn’t build this to compete with Product Hunt. I built it to give indie makers the platform they deserve, one where their creativity truly gets noticed.

If this sounds like something you’d want to check out, I’d love your thoughts. I’m still tweaking and improving it every day based on feedback.

Let me know what you think and if you’ve got a product you’re proud of, I’d love to see it shine.

abricq 2 days ago

If you care fairness, I have 1 extra suggestion that you might be interested in.

It was proven by several data-science research that when users have to votes (or give ratings) and if they are able to see the previous result, then the first few votes have an extremely important effect.

For instance here is one stury, very well written article by a famous teacher Robert West, "of sheep and beer" https://dlab.epfl.ch/2017-08-30-of-sheep-and-beer/ which describes this effect on beer-rating sites.

One way to overcome this effect is to hide the votes until enough votes were collected (eg more than 50). Another way is to hide votes until you have voted yourself.

abcd_f 2 days ago

You can see a form of this effect on HN itself, in particular in Show HN topics.

First few comments basically set the tone of the discussion and its dynamic. If they are shallow, negative or dismissive, the discussion gets stuck and takes a while to recover even if the submission has a lot of actual merit.

cassepipe 2 days ago

On the other hand it can recover. I am not going back to reading sequential pages on a forum. Good enough until something better comes along.

7bit 2 days ago

Similar with stackoverflow. A question with an answer is already uninteresting to other contributora, but if the answer is superficial or of bad quality on top of that, it lowers the chances of a good second answer dramatically.

This is from personal experience, not from any study, so take it with a ton of salt.

mettamage 2 days ago

This is not a study but a reality for me. At one point on HN I wanted to farm for karma points. That period lasted for a few weeks, I wasn't too intense about it, just a fun question I had.

My tactic? Find something that has something like 15 upvotes and you suspect to be rising quick in upvotes. Create the first comment and your best to make an as thoughtful comment as possible, even if you don't know anything about the topic.

Result: I was always within the top 3 getting between 10 to 50 upvotes.

One idea I have (just brainstorming) force users to make a vote first of 10 random products and only after they see the results.

It could probably use some UX tweaking since forcing someone to vote isn't quite nice, but at least it takes care of this effect that was described.

silisili 1 day ago

Serious question: what motivation was there?

AFAIK points aren't worth anything and don't unlock anything after the first few, probably to help block spam/bots.

It's exceedingly rare that I even click a profile here, and even then it's usually to see what a person works on not how many points they've accumulated.

In fact, there are many cases where the most knowledgeable person on a subject comments, I click to see who they are, and realize they've only ever commented a few times. I imagine they either mostly lurk, or have an idle account they just use when friends drag them into the conversation.

Lerc 2 days ago

I feel like that was gaming the system in the spirit of https://xkcd.com/810/

lakshikag 1 day ago

Thank you for the suggestion. I have implemented something like this but still experimenting with different factors.

klabb3 2 days ago

Another related aspect: it’s likely that tech hype sphere will not actually make much of a difference unless you’re selling to those people directly. My app Payload got featured in fastcompany, and I thought that was amazing. It drove traffic to the website and I was just waiting for the users… that didn’t come. And then a few days later back to normal.

On the other hand, the less prestigious tech blogs for regular people (think PC magazines) were much better at driving both real users and also traffic.

Anyway, the point is that your customers might not be on product hunt checking out the coolest newest hypiest products. In fact, it’s very unlikely they are. Just a reminder to not take these games so seriously.

amne 2 days ago

Isn't producthunt (and similar) aimed at VCs fishing for unicorns? The idea being that they'll know to then market your product where it belongs so they can grow it and make their billion. If that's not it, then vcfish.com is $12/year and available

klabb3 2 days ago

That sounds right. Now, I haven’t used producthunt but I believe they market themselves differently, with a heavy focus on ”creator community” and I believe they also call the VCs ”hunters”, suggesting perhaps that people are there looking for products to use and purchase, rather than an early investor club. LinkedIn, but instead of laborers and employees, it’s early founders and VCs? Doesn’t sound as sexy, and definitely not very indie hacker, tinkerer, explorer vibe. I don’t know if that’s the case, but it nevertheless feels like a mismatch between messaging and reality.

havefunbesafe 2 days ago

I really wish Ryan Hoover would take back the integrity of Product Hunt. It's such an amazing product with such currently painful execution, assumingly in the name of site traffic traded for ad dollars.

I truly think that the conversion rate for advertisers on PH would go UP if the quality of the site (moderated posts, comments, bot traffic) did the same.

jfactorial 2 days ago

I'm consistently baffled by the rarity of a product owner improving their bottom line by simply improving their users' experience.

Lerc 2 days ago

I think the calculation is made on the sum of user experience.

Any activity can be made worse if they find a way to increase users by other means.

OccamsMirror 2 days ago

It's not quick enough. People want juicy returns quickly. Consequences be damned.

ProofHouse 2 days ago

I left the site even before Ryan left, but yeah, he was the best person to steward it at forward. It’s been junk for a very long time.

ratedgene 2 days ago

Whatever happened to him that he gave up such a valuable resource for the community? I don't think it can be saved at this point though.

Brajeshwar 2 days ago

AngelList bought ProductHunt.

NetOpWibby 2 days ago

Oh he's gone? That explains a lot.

airstrike 2 days ago

This is awesome! Congrats on the metalaunch ;-) I found the site hard to navigate visually as everything was equally prominent (in fact, yesterday's launches pop more than the current ones right now), so I took a stab at a different layout.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/4qoY7o2.png

Code here: https://gist.github.com/airstrike/923a7049d5cde7405e60e99e22...

lakshikag 2 days ago

Thank you so much for the feedback and taking the time to create a new layout idea. I truly appreciate it. The goal has always been to make the site intuitive and focused on giving launches their moment to shine. So I will take a closer look at your suggestions to see how can I make it more visually clear.