

Start-up Launch Power: Product Hunt vs. Hacker News vs. TechCrunch - alexeichemenda
https://batch.com/blog/start-up-launch-power-product-hunt-hacker-news-techcrunch/

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alain94040
It's impressive how much less influential TechCrunch has become. To me, it's
pretty clear that the main reason is the sheer number of articles they publish
every day. Even if the overall audience is very large, the audience for each
article isn't so high. On the plus side, the people who read articles self-
select and are by definition interested in the topic, so the conversion rate
in the end is higher. Bottom line: with TC, you reach a wide audience and
extract the few that are relevant to your product.

Let's just say that 6 years ago when I launched on TC, the traffic numbers
were much higher.

~~~
alexeichemenda
You're absolutely right. It's interesting to see that more and more
journalists focus on number of clics / views, vs actual engagement. I guess
short term metrics like clics / views are one way to go, but definitely not a
good one for journalism on the long term.

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jsnell
> [HN] ... get some friends to upvote the link early on, but don’t be tempted
> to try and game the voting system.

I'm puzzled by the idea that setting up an ad hoc voting ring (apparently with
careful planning, as per the description on how to maximize the quality of the
fraudulent clicks) is somehow not gaming the system.

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minimaxir
Did you really ask your readers to share this article _twice in the same
article_?!

~~~
SimonDawlat
So you're not just a "sarcastic tech blog commentator", but also a harsh blog
post commentator :) But you're right. Removed it. Thx for reading til the end.

~~~
minimaxir
That wasn't a harsh comment.

What _is_ a harsh comment (and an annoying trend among all the "I got on
Product Hunt: look at me!" posts) is that you encourage vote cheating ( _" It
is perfectly fine, however, to promote your Product Hunt page on your groups,
forums, internal communications, etc. Introduce your community to the
featuring on ProductHunt, but don’t encourage them to vote one way or
another."_) because it isn't explicitly against the rules, but you don't
realize why that's a bad and unethical thing to do.

~~~
alexeichemenda
[Disclaimer : I know Batch's founder, but this comment will try to be very
objective]

Allow me to disagree. Product Hunt is a platform that lets users vote for the
best products. Asking for upvotes is wrong, because the people you ask feel
obligated to do it. When you _let people know_ you're on Product Hunt, they
have the choice to go upvote or not. If it's a good product, they will go and
upvote it. But this is the essence of Product Hunt. Filter good products and
make other users aware of good products.

~~~
minimaxir
> _When you let people know you 're on Product Hunt, they have the choice to
> go upvote or not. If it's a good product, they will go and upvote it. _

But if you are promoting to people who are your friends or are already fans of
your product per the original quote, they are not necessarily unbiased and are
not necessarily voting on the merit of the product itself.

~~~
SimonDawlat
I think I've lost you there, thanks for your thoughtful comments though.

