u/joy_hay_mein

Our first launch was in December. We hit 17, then I watched the rank slide and a chunk of our votes get wiped (they were from new accounts, PH stripped them). It was pretty demoralising tbh, felt like we'd done something wrong without knowing what.

relaunched recently. didn't blow up or anything, but we finished higher (13th), and this time not a single vote got stripped, all of them held. For me, that mattered more than the rank.

A few things I did differently:

- stopped chasing vote volume. focused on getting real, active people to actually engage + leave genuine comments instead of just racking up upvotes. Comments seem to carry more weight anyway.

- spent ~2 weeks before just being part of the community instead of showing up cold on launch day. small proof it worked: someone left a comment saying "I came over from your reddit", literally from a community I'd been hanging around in beforehand.

- didn't rush it. We actually pushed the launch back a week to ship a feature and fix the landing page, instead of launching just to hit a date.

Honestly, the 13 matters less to me than the fact that it was all real this time, and it held. In December, we were kind of "popular" for two hours, and then it evaporated.

not trying to brag, more a note to self/anyone about to relaunch: product hunt seems to reward being real over being loud. Has anyone else relaunched and done better the second time? Curious what moved the needle for you.

So this was our first proper product hunt launch, back in December, and honestly, I didn't really get how the platform worked going in.

What I did was get a bunch of people to make accounts and vote for us on launch day. Like 50, and at first it felt great, we were climbing, numbers going up, I was constantly refreshing. Then, maybe 2 hours in, I watched them start to drop off. By the end of the day, almost all of those votes were just gone.

Took me a while to figure out why. Turns out PH runs some kind of check every couple of hours and strips votes from brand-new or inactive accounts. Basically, anyone who showed up that day did one thing and left. Whatever survives that is your "real" score.

We relaunched recently, and now I know those same 50 people never opened Product Hunt again after December. So their accounts are basically dead, and I couldn't even ask them this time; it wouldn't have counted for anything anyway.

So the lesson I took (could be obvious to people who've done this a lot, but was not obvious to me): one vote from a real active account is worth way more than 50 made that morning. And a genuine comment seems to count for a lot more than a plain upvote, I've seen people say roughly 3x, but idk the exact number. Either way, I stopped asking anyone to vote. I just ask them what they actually think now.

Has anyone else had votes stripped like this, or know more about how the check actually works?

So, a couple of weeks back, a client of ours showed up in an AI answer, and the source it cited was a Reddit thread, not their site. Posted about it at the time and figured it might just be a fluke, so I actually went and checked properly, ran a pile of "best X in Y" queries through ChatGPT and perplexity.

And yeah, perplexity straight up lists "reddit community discussions" as one of its main sources. It even tied specific business recommendations to individual Reddit users (like "recommended by a Reddit user for competitive pricing"). So it's not a one-off, it's a documented part of how the thing works. chatgpt leaned more on directories and roundup blogs fwiw, but perplexity clearly weights reddit.

Which leads me to the part. If the AI is pulling recommendations from Reddit threads, then a brand getting mentioned naturally in the right subreddits is kind of an SEO asset now? not in the old backlink sense. More like the model treats Reddit as proof because it's real people talking instead of polished marketing copy.

And that feels both obvious and slightly cursed lol. Because the second marketers fully clock this, they're gonna start astroturfing subs to get clients mentioned, and then the whole reason the AI trusts Reddit (actual humans) quietly breaks. We'll have ruined another good thing.

I honestly don't know where I land on it. Part of me thinks the only real move is to just be genuinely useful in the communities your customers actually hang out in and let mentions happen on their own. The other part of me thinks that doesn't scale, and the spam wave is coming no matter what.

ok following up on my own thing from a bit back (a client of ours showed up in an AI answer, and the source it cited was a Reddit thread). Got curious and actually sat down and ran a pile of "best [niche] in [city]" queries through both chatgpt and perplexity. pediatric clinics, marketing agencies, interior designers, coffee shops, across Dubai / mumbai / san francisco. Just wanted to see who gets named and where each one is actually pulling from.

Bunch of small stuff I noticed (grain of salt, not a real study):

- Both list a TON (perplexity gave me like 15+ coffee shops), but then both collapse it into a tiny "top picks" or "start with X" shortlist at the end. So the long list is basically noise, and the 2-3 it pushes you toward is the whole game. not in the shortlist = may as well not be on the page.

- The named ones all had a clear one-liner + something verifiable behind it. review counts, star ratings, "known for X". Vague positioning just didn't show up at all.

- The source is the part that actually got me, though. ChatGPT, when I asked where it pulled from, was mostly directories and roundup blogs. agency spotter, a stack of "top 10 agencies in Dubai" listicles, and official sites. didn't really lean on Reddit at all.

- Perplexity was a totally different story. asked it the same thing and it straight up listed "reddit community discussions" as one of its main source types, and even tied specific recommendations to reddit users (like "this designer was recommended by a reddit user for competitive pricing"). It was basically quoting Reddit threads as validation.

So that earlier thing where my client got pulled off a Reddit thread, that wasn't a fluke; it's just how the perplexity-style engines work. They treat Reddit as real-people proof and weigh it heavily.

The takeaway forming in my head is that which AI someone uses kind of changes what you'd even optimize for. chatgpt = get into the roundup listicles + directories. perplexity = get genuinely talked about on reddit.

Anyway, that's two tools and a lazy afternoon, nothing rigorous. Has anyone else compared engines like this?

So I do the content/marketing side at a small agency, and I've been going down a bit of a rabbit hole on this whole "AI recommends businesses now" thing. won't rehash the full backstory, but basically, one of our clients got named by ChatGPT as a top option in their category, and it got me curious about WHY it picks who it picks.

And the more I dig, the more it feels kind of uncomfortable, at least if you're a smaller business.

The thing i keep coming back to is that ChatGPT (the normal one, not the browse/search mode) isn't actually looking anything up live when it recommends. It's pulling from stuff it already absorbed in training. So it's not really answering "who's the best clinic in this city right now," it's answering "who do I already know about in this category?" which is a pretty different question when you sit with it.

And when I look at the client that got named, it kind of makes sense. They were already a big deal way before we signed them. Like one of their doctors has somewhere around 200k followers, the clinic page itself is in the tens of thousands, tons of reviews, mentions and press, been around for years. So, of course, the model "knows" them. At that point, they're basically a known name, not just a business with a website.

which leads to the part I can't shake. If the AI is mostly recommending who it already knows, then a brand new business, even a genuinely good one, kind of has no shot in the near term. Doesn't matter how nice your site is or how good your service is this month. If the model has basically never come across your name anywhere, you're just not in the pool. You're "just text" to it.

I'll be honest, I have NOT tested this properly against a small, unknown business yet, so big grain of salt, this is half hunch. But it lines up with what I'm seeing, every business I've watched get named already had a big footprint before AI was even a thing.

So the takeaway forming in my head is that for a smaller business, there's no clever AI hack, it's just the slow, boring stuff. get mentioned in a lot of places over time, reviews, directories, get talked about, basically become "known" the long way around. No shortcut, because the model's frozen, you can't publish a good page this week and expect to show up next week.

anyway idk, maybe I'm overthinking it, or maybe this is obvious to people who've been doing seo way longer than me. mostly im trying to work out if a newer/smaller business can actually break into these AI recommendations from a standing start, or if it's really just the already-big brands getting named while everyone else is invisible for now. If anyone's actually seen a small one break through from nothing, I'd genuinely love to hear it, cause so far I haven't.

ok so I do the content/marketing side at a small agency (not the SEO guy, we've got someone for that), and something happened with one of our clients that I'm still kind of chewing on.

It's a healthcare client, a pediatric clinic. Someone on our side asked ChatGPT for the best private pediatric clinic in their city as a test, and the client just came up. named as one of the top ones, with a line about it being a leading clinic in the area. Nobody did anything that week to make that happen; it just showed up. 

But the part that actually got me was the source. The AI was citing a Reddit thread as where it pulled the recommendation from.

It's one example, could be a fluke, I know. But it sort of reframed the whole thing for me. Everyone's still grinding to rank #1 on Google, but when someone asks an AI, it only pulls 2-3 sources, and at least here, one of them was Reddit. way smaller door, and most people aren't even looking at it.

Our SEO guy went and looked at why it might've gotten pulled, and honestly, nothing crazy, mostly pages written as clear, direct answers, specific details instead of vague "trusted care" type wording, real names attached, and the Reddit mentions are probably doing some of the lifting. felt like the AI just grabbed whatever was easiest to quote and trust. 

idk if this is a real shift or mostly hype, but I'm leaning real, behaviour's already changing (half the people I know just ask ChatGPT now instead of Google).

Is the Reddit-as-a-source thing common? trying to figure out if it's actually worth building around.

Quick disclosure before anything, we're relaunching on Product Hunt today, so yeah, this is partly that. But I genuinely want to share what we got wrong last time, because I wish someone had told us before December.

A bit about me first, I joined this startup as an intern. Honestly, just trying to understand what the startup world even looks like from the inside, and over a few months, I sort of figured out where I fit. I'm on the marketing side now. The thing that clicked for me was stupidly simple: there's always a problem, there's always people who have that problem, and there's always something that solves it. Marketing is just connecting those two. And turns out that's the part I'm actually good at.

So December was our first product hunt launch, and it flopped. And the reason is kind of embarrassing looking back, we thought it was about votes. So we rounded up everyone we could and got a pile of upvotes and comments.

The problem is, almost none of those people were actual Product Hunt users. A lot of them made accounts just to vote for us. And PH's whole thing is real, active users engaging, not a bunch of brand new accounts showing up to upvote one product and then never touching the site again. The algorithm basically ignored most of what we brought in. We had the effort, we just aimed it at the completely wrong thing.

So if you're thinking of launching on PH, that's the one thing I'd save you from. It's not a numbers game of "get as many votes as humanly possible." It's real people who already use the platform, actually caring about what you built. Like ten of those genuinely beat a hundred randoms.

Anyway, we're going again today. nervous about it ngl but a lot less clueless than last time.