Posted everywhere yesterday. Only one place actually talked back.
Launched my zero-budget AI admin tool (Gemini + Notion) on Product Hunt yesterday. Also posted on LinkedIn and X.
Results: PH — a couple upvotes, mostly silence. LinkedIn — a handful of impressions, no real engagement. X — nothing.
IH — actual conversations. People asking real questions, someone even went and tested the product and left feedback. Wildly different from the other three.
I think I finally get why "stop launching, start commenting" keeps showing up in this community. A cold launch to strangers is a coin flip. A conversation with someone already thinking about the same problem is not.
Not sure yet if that scales past a few weeks of doing this, but for now — building the product is the easy part. Getting anyone to actually see it is the real project.
Curious for people further along: did IH stay your best channel long-term, or did it eventually plateau too?
This resonates. It’s easy to focus on where you can get the most impressions, but a few real conversations can be much more useful than a big number of passive views. I’m starting to think commenting and learning from existing discussions should come before trying to constantly create new ones.
Update on this — fixed my empty profile bio based on feedback in this thread, and picked up a genuinely useful heuristic from another comment for automation decisions (local+reversible = auto, anything that "leaves the building" = confirm first). Small thread, real value. Appreciate everyone who chimed in.
Our setup matches the pattern, with a twist worth adding. We sell a $19 product (an AI outreach kit) on two rails — a crypto storefront and an itch.io page — and the direct numbers are humble: single-digit views a day. The channel that did produce real replies was exactly what you describe: showing up in threads where founders already argue about the problem (outreach, launch distribution) with specifics instead of a pitch.
Since you ask whether it scales — that's what we're testing now, by treating each comment like a micro-launch: one concrete number, one concrete method, no link, then watching whether profile visits follow. Early but real observation: threads with 10-30 comments outperform the front page for us; huge-voice threads bury you unless you're among the first five replies.
One answer to your last question, from the seller's side: conversations didn't convert for us either until the profile itself did the selling — a bio that names the product and the price, with the product page one click away. If the profile is empty, commenting is just chatting.
That last point about the profile doing the selling is a really good catch — mine's basically empty right now, just my name, nothing about what I'm building. Fixing that today.
The "10-30 comments, first five replies" observation is useful too — I've mostly just been jumping into whatever looked relevant without checking thread size or how early I was. Going to start paying attention to that instead of just topic fit.
Appreciate the detail here, way more actionable than most of the feedback I've gotten so far.
The interesting signal is the conversations, not the impressions.
Do IH users also become users, or mainly commenters?
Honestly, too early to say for sure — my product page views are still tiny (single digits/day) so I can't attribute much to IH specifically yet. So far it's mostly been genuine conversation and feedback, not confirmed signups. My guess is IH is better for sharpening the product and building credibility than for direct conversions, at least at this stage — but I'll actually have real numbers in a week or two and can report back.
That’s a sensible distinction. The interesting part will be whether the conversations eventually translate into behavior once you have enough volume to attribute it. I’ll be interested to see what the numbers say.
Fair enough — I'll circle back on this thread once I actually have a week or two of data instead of guesses. Appreciate you pushing on the attribution question, it's exactly the thing I should be tracking more carefully instead of just vibes.
Makes sense. The data should make the distinction much clearer than impressions or early conversations can.
Agreed — talk soon, once I have something more than gut feel to share.