Originally published March 19, 2018 , updated on May 31, 2023

Launching a new product on Product Hunt?

Here are the top 10 reviews I received when I asked the question on a few Facebook groups.

Thought I’d share it with others who might find it helpful.

Thanks everyone who helped me with making a decision. FYI: I just signed up.

(Probably the most comprehensive answer came from Kaloyan Yankulov – no. 10)

Galina Divakova If your product is relevant to community, it might be worth it. We collected 300 emails when using it.
Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré using it for my book but haven’t fully taken advantage of everything you can do on it, so I don’t feel I have a lot of feedback to share yet. I do however feel like it’s super useful for pre-launch initiatives, and pre-launch IMO is everything.

Omer Molad Helped us build momentum when we launched our expert community, and really turbocharged our assessment library.
Joshua Bradley I have used Ship – the tools are pretty solid along with some good messaging options, including importing your own lists. Perhaps the most valuable feature when paid for is being able to schedule your launch on PH.

Arthur Tkachenko Product Hunt works if you have a community. Also, it’s a great idea to save time and don’t set up another landing page.
Saravana Kumar we are using Ship, the promoted upcoming page is quite useful. Even though the impact is not exactly like PH launch, it’s there and we see few signups here and there. The other advantage I see is when someone subscribes you can see the number of followers for them in PH, this will help to build the relationship and when you are launching you can reach out to them.

Annie Gherini We are using it right now at Affinity. So far it has been great. Helps you get everything ready for the upcoming launch. The team has been super helpful too.
Alexey Chernikov Yes, used, and I would say yes, it’s worth paying for as long as you’re planning to work with your community closely. Pro plan offers you a very useful Survey tool to collect & validate data from your subscribers.

Bruce Kraft Jr. Product Hunt Ship opens possibilities. But if you don’t have an infrastructure in place to maximize on ship, you’ll just get lost in the “upcoming” crowd
Kaloyan Yankulov I see a lot of positive comments and reviews here, so here is the contrarian position about Ship. While we love ProductHunt, Ship wasn’t really up to par with the usual spirit and standards of the platform.

Here are a few things that you should consider before paying:
Appearing in the Upcoming list directory takes longer than you would expect. You can’t be certain when exactly the guys will publish your listing, which makes marketing preparation and planning difficult. I appreciate the PH team is reviewing every product manually, but usually, when you pay a premium, you expect to be up and running quickly. (Only Pro and Super Pro Ship subscribers get on Upcoming list)

As Bruce mentioned, unless you have the marketing system in place, you’ll just get lost. I.e., don’t rely on Ship to get subscribers organically. I see most of the positive reviews are from Ship beta users. Maybe back then there was more organic exposure. But it seems now it’s just another crowded channel. You should rely only on your own muscles to make it work.
When you look at Ship from a purely technical point for $79/mo you get:

– non-customizable basic landing page

– basic email service provider

– basic surveys and polls.

This set of features sounds reasonable at first, but when you draw the line, it’s much cheaper to use a full-fledged landing page/site builder (like Simvoly.com – $7/mo) + a robust email service provider (like ActiveCampaign – $29/mo) + GoogleForms/Typeform which are free. This is $36 in total for up to 1000 subscribers. For half the price of Ship, you get a solid stack of apps to do your pre-launch.

Even then you can still pre-launch on Product Hunt by regularly submitting a product with a “pre-launch” status.

Now where things got really ugly with Ship:
Since Ship wasn’t working out for us, 15 days into our Pro subscription we requested a cancellation. To our surprise, they cancelled our monthly Pro plan. With that, we lost all pro features, access to our subscribers, and our place on the upcoming page.

On the planet I live on, a monthly subscription means a 30-day subscription. Apparently, it’s not so for PH. When we kindly asked to have our premium features back for the time we’ve been billed for PH rejected us.

This treatment doesn’t reflect the community values PH shares..at least in my books.

I love PH and will continue pre-launching products via the regular submission, but I won’t be using Ship in the near future.

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