
Open Hunt is shutting down - tortilla
https://www.openhunt.co/?=shutdown
======
jacquesc
If someone wants to take over OpenHunt, email us at support@openhunt.co

The code and production database is available (with all the users and
projects), so you'd be able pick it up right where it left off.

I was going to write up a post-mortem but haven't gotten to it yet. Anthony
Franco's comment on HN was pretty spot on:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10940729)

Would like to reiterate (as I said on the original launch threads on HN),
OpenHunt had no animosity towards ProductHunt. The community (including me)
had some critiques against how PH was being run, but instead of constantly
complaining about things, we launched an experiment to see if things would be
better with an open source community.

It didn't work out this go around, but I'm hopeful another team can do better.

~~~
peckrob
Let me provide you with a little bit of feedback for your future projects.

You had a great launch that showed a lot of interest from the community. I
still think there's room in the ecosystem for an open competitor to PH's
closed model. But what did you do to capture that initial surge of visitors
and bring them back? What were your plans to keep user engagement strong?

Here's an example:

When you posted this on HN 78 days ago, I asked if you had a daily summary
email [0] like Product Hunt did. This is primarily how I interact with Product
Hunt. An informal survey of my coworkers shows the same thing. We all read the
daily email. It keeps us coming back to PH. This, IMHO, essential feature that
Product Hunt had Open Hunt lacked on launch day.

For some reason I think you may have added it later, and I seem to recall I
may have signed up for it. But looking through my emails I never received a
single email from Open Hunt and, after awhile, I forgot it existed at all.
Until today, when you announced you were shutting it down.

Engage your users. Capture visitors. Give them a reason to keep coming back
and engaging with your product, or they'll forget it exists.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762614)

~~~
jacquesc
It was good advice, and I agree with you. We added email about a week later
and got a couple hundred signups to it. But by then there wasnt enough traffic
or submissions to really make those digests valuable.

We should have had it at launch. It still might not have been enough, but it
would have been a much better shot.

~~~
seiji
Everything falls after launch. Everything.

It's relatively easy to get the "hey look over there!" viral bump, but beyond
that it turns into a game of retention with ugly words like "drip campaign."

People are always interested in "new," but they need a reason to keep
returning. That's what makes a business run.

(kinda like how, for movies, the opening weekend gets all the news, but not so
much the 22nd weekend.)

------
CM30
Already? Why?

Community building is a long term thing, not something you get through in a
few months or so. I mean yeah, it won't be Product Hunt 2.0 right off the bat,
but you need to give it more time than this.

~~~
orliesaurus
I agree, lobste.rs (which is like, for those who don't know, a more focused
version of hackernews) didn't give up after a couple of months and look where
they are now! healthy community of highly tech focused news & commentary.

~~~
harlanlewis
The ~23 items on the lobste.rs home page have a total of 18 comments.

~~~
tptacek
It's really too bad. I spent a couple minutes checking Lobste.rs out again
after reading this comment, and that site is _very_ nicely done.

~~~
sandGorgon
the site is fairly opinionated - for example i wanted to contribute a pull for
adding an oauth provider to lobsters. If you think about how lobsters works
and their moderation log [1] and invite audit [2], it seems almost beautifully
designed for "hacker" identity. But jcs doesnt want it.

[1] [https://lobste.rs/moderations](https://lobste.rs/moderations) [2]
[https://lobste.rs/u](https://lobste.rs/u)

------
wuliwong
I think the big product miss with OpenHunt was not showing the comments. The
lack of conversation reduced it to just a list of links. I think a similar
offering or even an updated re-release of this code with a visible discussion
could be great. Thanks to jacquesc for giving it a great try and being so
gracious to leave it open for someone else!

~~~
jacquesc
Thanks! I agree about the lack of public comments being a big mistake. We
should have just thrown Disqus in there to get it started. We tried to do a
weird, more complicated feedback feature and it didn't really work out.

~~~
jfoster
Actually, as someone who had the same product on both OpenHunt and featured on
Product Hunt, I found the OpenHunt feedback very interesting. Perhaps a more
open commenting feature would've been better across general users, but you
didn't completely miss the mark!

~~~
wuliwong
Sorry for the super late response, I forgot about my comment. I wonder if
another option would just to have things communicated a little more clearly to
the commenter. Maybe some way to view all the comments you've sent, even allow
you to edit them. Also, if they person receiving the comments had the option
of responding, might be cool too?

------
jacquesc
Here's the traffic chart if anyone's interested :)
[http://cl.ly/0A3K3U0V1V0e](http://cl.ly/0A3K3U0V1V0e)

~~~
minimaxir
Interesting. A good barometer of the amount of traffic a front-page HN
submission receives is about 100 pageviews/point. OpenHunt, with 1000+ points
when it launched, only received about _15_ pageviews per point. (and that's
not even counting the traffic it received from Product Hunt proper, which is
likely less significant.)

Maybe I have to recalibrate that particular heuristic.

~~~
tedmiston
I'd like to hear more about this. Is the 100 an observation from personal
posts or analysis from some dataset?

~~~
minimaxir
More of an observation of those who have discussed traffic resulting from HN,
and from my own analytics when my posts hit the front page.

------
bt3
As CM30 suggested, the "going away" message is awfully vague. Calling the site
an "experiment" might be an interesting way to forgo actual considerations
like upkeep costs, but the fact remains that this "experiment" ended too early
and without much reason.

At first, it seems at though Product Hunt legal went after them, but the fact
they're offering to hand off the domain and the codebase itself suggests
otherwise.

~~~
ikeboy
Yeah, should have used shutdownify
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10088229)

~~~
bt3
Oh the irony of a shutdown-service shutting down.

~~~
ikeboy
That was satire, in case it isn't clear.

------
tedmiston
In the spirit of openness, I have 7 invites for comment access on Product
Hunt. I offer them to anyone who was active on Open Hunt or would be active on
PH given the ability to comment.

To avoid making noise here, please email or tweet me [both in profile]
something with "HN Product Hunt" instead of commenting. I will update with a
comment once they're all accounted for.

------
jarnix
Anyone would like to keep the service running? I could help finance/code/etc,
let's keep it up!!

~~~
joeblau
I'm curious as to what your motivations are to keep this up and running?

------
phantom_oracle
It would be interesting to have a service where you can put these types of
projects into a moratorium, so that they stay in a somewhat passively-active
mode to see if any other interested parties would like to take it over,
instead of killing it off instantly.

------
jiten_bansal
Contact me at support@betapage.co

------
imaginenore
I can't imagine that running that thing was expensive or time consuming. I
would just leave it running.

~~~
unclebucknasty
There can be a lot of value in moving on.

------
dragonlayout
yes,is good to know.

