I decide what's featured on the leaderboard - AMA w/ Gabe from Product Hunt
Hi everyone, Gabe here! I lead curating Product Hunt's leaderboard.
First thing I will say is that if I could feature every single product that works, I would. I love supporting makers and demoing products. I actually try to test every single thing that gets hunted every day... which is A TON. But I view our job as to surface the most interesting, novel, useful, and innovative products - daily. Now we may not always get it right, the process isn't perfect, but we're trying to do right by the community.
Hopefully, you've noticed that over the past months the quality of the leaderboard has felt really good. (Please share your thoughts!) Some of the things that I've been doing aside from testing and reviewing products is reaching out to makers to help them with their launches, provide feedback on why something may not be featurable, and help makers craft their best launch as possible. Scalable -> no. Huge impact -> I think so. I'm working with the team on how to create a more scalable version of this but for now just know I try to make myself available to you all.
Top mistakes I've seen
Product is waitlisted
People schedule a draft.... (we have a draft function!)
Maker's profile is their product/business and not an actual user account
Tagline does not describe the product ie. "Best way to earn users" vs "Capture user data with a single button in your iOS app"
Too much marketing jargon, not enough product description / story
NO PRODUCT SHOTS/VIDEOS -> just marketing fluff images
Only one image that is a low quality screenshot
Using a paid service for upvotes/hunters -> this will get you unfeatured or severely impact your launch
Some other notes to consider:
We've gotten stricter on keeping true to our Featuring Guidelines.
We highly recommend making a draft and sharing with folks to make sure it passes the "mom test" -> do they get what you're launching?
If you can quickly Google a solution that similar to what you're launching then really make sure your launch stands out. Focus on highlighting what's special about your product vs being too general.
Highly recommend having a loom or some sort of visual that showcases the start process, the end result your product produces, and what's special about your product.
Be honest, authentic, and have fun.
With all that being said, AMA! I'll try to answer as much as I can without getting fired
Replies
One year ago, and the relevance still holds today. Thank you for sharing launch tips on this thread, Gabe!
Our team has been building on Bitcoin Finance for 2 years as a web-based dApp. We’re now going full force into a consumer-focused iOS launch, pivoting from Bitcoiners to general consumers.
My question for you is about Launch Structure:
Since this is a massive shift in platform (Web to iOS) and audience (Degen to Normies), do you recommend we launch the iOS app as a completely new product, or should we keep it under the existing brand profile to show our 2-year history and building experience?
Is this still how things work or you switched to automatic moderation? Last Monday only 16 products were featured, out of 230, some of them pretty low quality. Next day 60 were featured, many had just one image, not even a maker comment, like really lowest quality slop. I think it was some special day, but still. It would be great to better understand how things work in the background.
Thank you for this transparency, Gabe. As a solo maker launching PictaBase today, reading through your "Top Mistakes" list felt like a pre-flight checklist. It’s incredibly grounding to see a curator prioritize product story over marketing fluff.
The "Mom Test" is especially resonant. I spent 30 years in Hollywood post-production, where I saw million-dollar projects stall because of "dumb" folders. Explaining a relational visual database can get technical fast, but at its heart, it’s just about making sure you never lose a photo again.
How we applied your guidelines to our launch:
No Marketing Jargon: We’ve skipped the "revolutionary AI-powered synergy" talk. Instead, we’re focusing on the fact that we’ve hardened 38,500 lines of PHP 8.4 code to PHPStan Level 8—it’s built for stability, not just vibes.
Real Product Shots: Our demo isn't a glossy render; it's a look at how our pixel-blind architecture actually works—sending image bytes directly from the browser to S3 so our server never even sees them.
No Waitlists: We’re live. Anyone can jump into our Free Tier (250 MB) and start stress-testing the relational metadata right now.
The "Mom Test" Feature: If my mom wants to find a photo of her garden from three years ago, she shouldn't have to navigate a complex folder tree. In PictaBase, she can search by "garden" and "2021" and find it instantly because of the .meta.json sidecar files that keep her data portable and searchable forever.
We appreciate the work you and the team do to surface tools that solve real problems. It’s what keeps this community useful rather than just noisy.
For anyone who wants to see a launch that prioritizes technical rigor and data sovereignty, our fully functional Free Tier is open for business today.
Question for you, Gabe: You mentioned that "interesting, novel, and useful" are your North Stars. In a world currently flooded with AI wrappers, does a tool's architectural sovereignty (like owning your own S3 bucket and metadata) count as "novel" again, or is the community still primarily focused on the front-end "magic"?