By Kiki Schirr, {grow} Contributing Columnist
If you haven’t heard of Product Hunt, you’re missing out. Recently acquired by the startup-obsessed company AngelList, Product Hunt has seen an influx of energy and creativity since the merger.
At its core, Product Hunt is a launch platform for new startups and a community of eager early adopters waiting to test out new products. There is no better place to quickly grab your first thousand users.
I’ve written about Product Hunt before, but its incredible pace of change means that it’s due for a revisit. This ain’t the Product Hunt you once knew.
1. Product Hunt is democratizing
While in the past, in part to protect the value of the community while it was still growing, products “hunted” by certain users were given an algorithmic boost. Now if Kevin Rose or Casey Neistat waltz in with a product, there will still be hype, but the days of prioritized posts are over.
Now any person with a Product Hunt account can submit a product, including their own. This is huge, because the algorithm boost used to unfairly benefit Silicon Valley startups and their network of contacts. Now amazing Indian or Eastern European startups face a level playing field.
This also means that it’s not too late to get started with Product Hunt today. If you haven’t yet signed up, don’t despair that you’ll never gain influence. It’s a new world out there.
2. The marketing tool: Ship
Ship is an all-in-one launch package for startups. It includes a launch landing page, email subscription tools, email messaging tools, analytics, A/B testing, and webhooks among its many features. The tool makes use of Product Hunt’s new Upcoming feature, which highlights products that have not yet launched. Upcoming also gathers interested potential users’s emails.
The service is not cheap. To secure instant access, the monthly fee starts at $79.99. For the full suite of tools, you’re looking at $249.99.
However, when you consider that the features add up to many different services: Carrd or Launchrock with MailChimp and Slack plus Optimizely and Google Analytics, it’s difficult to place a value on having a single dashboard for all of these tools.
Freelance marketers be warned! Ship might not be your friend if you specialize in handling product launches. This type of simplification could dig into your bread and butter.
3. Product Hunt project needs marketers
Product Hunt just launched an international, month-long hackathon. A hackathon is a contest that requires groups to quickly build new products to certain specs or in certain categories, for a prize.
What is unique about this hackathon, beside its long duration, is that Product Hunt is uniting people around the globe. They are leveraging international talent and creating diverse teams to work together. Mubashar Iqbal, a prolific maker on Product Hunt, even put together a tool to unite new teams across borders.
Freelance marketers especially should take note because while many of these teams will only collaborate for the duration of this contest, others will take flight. And fledgling startups are often in need of marketing consultation.
4. A mysterious project in the works
I wish I could say that I’m holding on to a juicy secret here, but I know about as much regarding the new Product Hunt work in progress as anyone. Meaning that I know next to nothing.
I do know that it’s bound for both iOS and Android. That has delighted Android users who have missed out on the native Product Hunt app, available on iOS only.
You can learn a little more, and sign up for launch notification, here.
I hope that this article has intrigued you and that you take a moment to explore the interesting launch tool that Product Hunt has become. Please leave a comment if you have any questions or would like to share a story about using Product Hunt!
Kiki Schirr is the founder of WeKiki distributed video platform. She is also the author of the Product Hunt Manual, which is out of print, but you can check out her upcoming book on cryptocurrencies! Kiki can be reached easily through Twitter.
