indiehackers

4 posts with the tag “indiehackers”

Product Hunt doesn't really work, but you should still use it to launch your product

May 7, 2025

Many of us have been launching on Product Hunt for a while, and more and more folks have started questioning whether the audience there is genuine and whether it is still worth launching on their platform.

Being fresh out of our latest launch from a week ago, I wanted to share here our first-hand experience and cover three main things:

How does launching on Product Hunt look and feel today
What we got from the launch
How to make (the best) use of Product Hunt for your product

About us - launched 6x, >2,000 upvotes

We’ve launched 6 times on Product Hunt in the last 4 years, won “Top Product” awards (#1 and #5 of the day), and collected over 2,000 upvotes in total. Our last launch was with Open SaaS - an open-source alternative to $300+ SaaS starters.

You will find many articles with advice for launching on PH, and winning stories from those who got featured, but almost nobody shares behind-the-scenes knowledge and what it really took to get there. That is the purpose of this post.

I will guide you through the steps of the launch and comment and share our experiences from each of them. Let’s get started:

Scheduling your launch and creating a “Coming soon” teaser - “let’s exchange upvotes”

Once you schedule your Product Hunt launch, you can create a banner to appear on their “Coming soon” page (https://www.producthunt.com/coming-soon), and this is where your journey starts. This gives PH visitors an opportunity to see what’s coming next and to subscribe to get notified once it launches, and it is also the first thing you can use for marketing your launch.

This is also when the PH economy starts - as soon as you publish your launch teaser, you will start receiving offers to exchange upvotes with other people launching their products soon:

This is actually a legitimate strategy (in the sense of shared incentives and not buying votes) that can probably be utilized pretty efficiently via automation. It won’t bring any qualified leads (aka people genuinely interested in your product), but it might help with the upvotes, resulting in the increased visibility and reach of your launch.

We haven’t used this strategy at all (so I cannot testify to its efficiency), since we published our “Coming soon” page quite late, just a day or two before the launch, and we also didn’t have the workflow in place nor manpower to pull it off.

There are also specialized groups on Linkedin, WhatsApp, and other platforms for PH participants to support each other in this way. If you join these, you will, expectedly so, receive even more such messages and requests.

Launch day - unsolicited emails and “buy upvotes” offers

On the launch day, the requests like the one above intensified. I even got several emails from others launching products on the same day asking for an upvote, as they scraped my email and added me to their newsletter.

First 4 hours of the day - hidden upvotes

Product Hunt recently introduced the feature of showing the products in the randomized order, with the upvote count hidden, for the first 4 hours of the day. The idea behind this is to guarantee all products have equal visibility at the start and a fair chance to grab the attention of the audience.

With our latest launch, Open SaaS, we had the best opening ever - 100 upvotes in 4 hours!

We, of course, engaged our network, but also noticed a lot of upvotes and comments from the people we don’t personally know. With such a strong start, I was quite confident we secured our place in the top 5 products on the leaderboard.

Being in the top 5 products is an “above the fold” position on Product Hunt’s home page, so getting there early is the best way to end up there.

But when the leaderboard was finally revealed, Open SaaS was barely in the top 10 launches of the day!

There was a quite noticeable cut-off between the first five places and the rest, and the product in the first place had almost double the upvotes than the second one. That was fairly demotivating for us as it felt like we had literally zero chance of catching up.

”Hey, wanna buy some upvotes?”

After the leaderboard reveal, we started receiving another type of message - direct offers to buy upvotes. Being still relatively close to being in the top 5 products probably made us a highly qualified lead:

A slight variation of this is having different social media influencers and community owners reach out and offer to market your launch to their followers, promising X upvotes:

Even some of our direct contacts knew “a guy” that could get you to the top of Product Hunt and offered to intro us, so it kinda started feeling like a “public secret”, and us being the rare ones who didn’t know about it.

The main benefit of our PH launch wasn’t the launch itself, but rather the fact we could combine it with other things, like launching Open SaaS on HackerNews, where it ended up being featured for about half a day (and much longer on Show HN tab).

Finally, all that engagement combined allowed us to get trending globally on GitHub, which in turn brought in even more traffic to Open SaaS (today, a week after launching, it has over 2.5k stars).

The resulting traffic

Taking a look at the traffic that was brought to Open SaaS’s repo in the last two weeks, here’s what we can observe:

HackerNews launch brought in more than 3 times more people than Product Hunt. GitHub brought even fewer people to the actual repo, but my gut feeling is that many more of them starred it without leaving the Trending page.

Open SaaS ended the launch as the #7 product of the day, with about ~400 upvotes. The top 10 products of the day end up in a daily newsletter that has over 500,000 subscribers, according to the Product Hunt.

The newsletter starts with 3 big promotional blocks, so you must scroll quite a bit to reach the top products of the previous day.

For us, it didn’t make a huge dent, I think it got us about 20 upvotes. Maybe it was due to the fact we weren’t number one, or simply because it’s quite a deep funnel (open email → scroll all the way down → check all the products → like Open SaaS → decide to upvote it).

Is it even possible to win #1 of the day without any boosting strategies?

Yes, it is definitely still possible. I’ve had it confirmed by a couple of contacts that I trust and who won #1 with their products, without any bots or paying for upvotes. But it’s also definitely become less common and less predictable.

Most of the times we were launching, the product in the first place exhibited some unusual behavior. Once, it was the company that launched the week before, but they just slightly rebranded the product and the website and re-launched it. Another time, a product received a very sudden spike in upvotes just hours before the end of the launch.

So, what does all this mean? Is it still worth launching on Product Hunt?

It is obvious that today, there are different forces and incentives driving the behavior of Product Hunt users from both sides. Initially, there was a community that wanted to learn about the latest products and express their interest, and there were founders that wanted to connect to that community.

Now, there are also creators who foremost want their product to win, no matter the actual audience engagement, as they believe that will help them with their end goal - e.g., reach, fundraising, or social validation towards other users. And there is obviously a side willing to fulfill that demand without having any real interest in the product.

Why is that possible? Product Hunt is taking a lot of measures to detect and prevent such behavior, but it is hard to do it without severely limiting the network effect (aka being able to share your launch link around) that Product Hunt is going for.

Besides all that, for us it is still worth it to regularly launch on Product Hunt. Here’s why.

Product Hunt is an amazing excuse

Product Hunt gives you a unique opportunity to declare an “official” launch of your product. You can decide on which day you want to do it, schedule it, and it’s 100% going to be there for everybody to see, and for you to share and invite people to check it out. You get 24 hours, during which it is fully justifiable to contact everyone you know (and beyond) and keep tooting your horn.

You can’t do that with other high-reach platforms such as Reddit, and HackerNews. You are, of course, free to share the news about your product at any time, but there is no guarantee that anybody will see it (quite the opposite, actually) unless the collective mind of the community decides so, which is all but deterministic. You could easily spend a week preparing your launch post just for it to get drowned by the algorithm in minutes.

That’s why we look at Product Hunt not as the final goal (winning #1) but as simply a part of our overall launch process. It’s a great podium to be standing on, and a good excuse to talk about your product, and anything else on top is just a bonus.

We keep it simple

You will find a lot of articles (and paid courses) from “PH gurus”, explaining how you should prepare your launch months in advance, warm up your audience, prepare comments they will share, etc. We don’t do any of that. We just prepare the content (video + a few screenshots, and an intro comment), and, on the day of the launch, invite everyone we know to support us. Then, during the day, we also post on Reddit, Hackernews, and dev.to.

Sometimes we end up in the top 5, sometimes we don’t, but every time, we get a solid uptick in user engagement, and usually something much better follows in the next days/weeks. For example, MAGE, our GPT-powered full-stack app starter, exploded after its PH launch and has been used to create over 30,000 projects in a few months.

We do it often

Our goal is to launch on Product Hunt every 3 months as a part of our Launch Week, and that’s what we’ve done so far. You cannot really launch the exact same product unless 6 months have passed or there’s been a significant update, but you are free to launch other (sub)products and features connected to your main product.

💡 Hint: when you submit a launch, you can ask the PH team to “connect” it to your product so it will appear in a list of launches for that product. Often, they do it on their own. It will look like this:

Although our main product is Wasp, a full-stack framework on top of React & Node.js, here’s what we launched so far:

Wasp Alpha - pure product, v0 pretty much
Wasp Beta - almost two years later, we haven’t yet adopted the “launch often” approach
Free SaaS template - a predecessor of Open SaaS, 4 months later
*MAGE, GPT Web App Generator* - a full-stack web app generator powered by Wasp
Full-stack auth for React/Node, no 3rd party services - Wasp’s auth feature
And finally, Open SaaS - A free, open-source alternative to $300+ React & Node.js SaaS starters

It’s become a regular part of our launch workflow, and for whatever new feature(s) we introduce in that quarter, we’ll look for a good candidate to showcase in the upcoming launch. That allows us to keep talking about what we do, and we also get a lot of good content (e.g., videos, banners) that we can embed in our docs, blog posts, etc.

For example, this is a video showing how auth works in Wasp - first we used it for our Product Hunt launch, and now it lives at the top of our auth docs.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading this far! This turned out to be quite a bit longer post than I initially expected, but I just kept getting more ideas on what to write about. I hope you will find it helpful for planning your next launch and that you will also know a bit better what to expect along the way.

I would also love to get your feedback and hear about your experiences and strategies for launching on Product Hunt.

Happy launching!

Going from an Idea to MVP in Weeks: PromptPanda's Launch(es)

Mar 12, 2025

Milica

Growth @ Wasp

Did you know that most co-founders meet each other through work? Lander Willem met his friend and co-founder Bram Billiet while they were working at the local venture fund. They both shared the love towards LLMs and got the idea to kickstart their SaaS after experiencing the same pain points with managing and versioning prompts.

In this post, you’ll learn how they:

Shipped their SaaS from idea to MVP in weeks, using modern AI stack
Launched and got trending on Product Hunt with 100+ upvotes
Successfully onboarded first users

The problem: Managing prompts is messy

Right after OpenAI released their first LLM models, Lander and Bram started exchanging tips on how to get optimal results from prompts. Soon, they learned that managing AI prompts is often chaotic.

People who share prompts usually do so through messaging apps such as Slack, Microsoft Teams or in better cases, shared Google Docs documents. Some of the people they talked to even confessed they were sharing their favorite prompts using screenshots 😅. Although a Google Doc might work initially, people quickly bump into issues regarding versioning and granular access management.

This is how they got the idea to create PromptPanda - a SaaS that allows people to exchange prompts in an easy way. Here’s an interactive demo you can click through to see what they’ve built:

The opportunity: Everyone uses prompts, not just devs

Other AI prompt tools are primarily designed with developers in mind, which leaves out non-technical teams. Those less technical users depend heavily on collaboration, efficiency, and consistency to complete their tasks. This is the market PromptPanda decided to go after.

The tool is designed specifically to help teams centralize their prompts and ensures consistent output quality. Collaboration is painless because of an intuitive web app that also has a Chrome extension.

PromptPanda integrates with major AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, and DeepSeek. Coupled with its built-in Prompt Improver, these integrations allow users to quickly test, iterate, and enhance their prompts, while not imposing any limitations for the end-users.

With this approach they covered a market that other companies overlooked, non-technical users who rely on the biggest LLM providers for their daily tasks.

⭐️ Star the Open SaaS repo and support open-source tools for builders, by builders!

Launching is unpredictable: Product Hunt hits and flops

As soon as the app was somewhat stable and usable, Lander and Bram decided to launch on ProductHunt.

Their first ProductHunt launch was great in terms of visibility. They were featured by the ProductHunt team which got them a bunch of upvotes and comments. Although there was quite a lot of engagement with the launch, it didn’t really end up in sticky, paying customers.

A short while later they relaunched on ProductHunt after processing the feedback from their first launch. Both their product and launch campaign were much better prepared. Weirdly enough, the launch mostly failed as they got almost no upvotes or conversions.

Although their second launch was mostly a flop, it did manage to get them mentioned in a Superhuman (the email app) newsletter. Their user base doubled overnight.

Ever since then they have an active stream of users and new signups coming in.

”My main takeaway is to never stop shipping, and always share your work!”

Lander Willem

Most of their users today have found PromptPanda through organic SEO. They started writing articles about AI Prompt Management which have quickly found traction in search engine algorithms.

Choosing the right stack for developing your SaaS app

PromptPanda’s team chose Open SaaS because it significantly streamlined their product development by simplifying backend setup, database management, and built-in authentication. This was crucial as they needed an efficient solution that could save time due to their busy schedules. Wasp’s default integration with Fly also enabled rapid deployment, allowing them to quickly validate their product idea without getting bogged down in infrastructure complexities.

Here’s a full overview of their tech stack alongside all the tools they rely on to run their SaaS:

Are you ready to ship your SaaS now?

PromptPanda’s story proves the best SaaS ideas come from solving your own pain points. Lander and Bram also learned launching isn’t predictable—success can come from unexpected places, even failed launches. The takeaway? Keep building, keep shipping, and always share your progress openly.

If you enjoyed this post please make sure to give Open SaaS a star on GitHub, this keeps us going forward and supports our work!

From 0 to 400+ Customers: SaaS Growth Hacks from a Serial Founder

Jan 30, 2025

Milica

Growth @ Wasp

Meet Ricardo - he has successfully launched multiple SaaS products, turning his ideas into revenue-generating apps. If you’re looking to build and launch your own product efficiently, we’re about to share some of Ricardo’s key strategies.

He’s a developer with a background in telecom engineering, having held leadership roles at companies like Vodafone and Glovo. But after years of putting fires out in management, he returned to hands-on development, focusing on building apps that solve real problems—fast.

By leveraging Open SaaS, Ricardo was able to ship multiple projects quickly, skipping the usual headaches of setting up authentication, payments, and other things every SaaS needs. In this post, you’ll discover what types of SaaS products he launched and the strategies he used to get them off the ground.

Why Ricardo Chose Open SaaS

When searching for frameworks to kickstart his projects, Ricardo stumbled upon Open SaaS, a 100% free, open-source starter for React & Node.js. and. He was drawn to Open SaaS because of its simplicity, community, and modern tech stack. He also liked the fact that the company had Y Combinator seal of approval.

“The fact that Wasp is low-friction and uses a great stack like Prisma, React, Node.js, and TypeScript—made it stand out. Plus, the community is super helpful. You can get started fast without spending hours on setup.”

What Ricardo loves most:

Pre-built Features: Open SaaS relies on Wasp - a full stack framework for React, Node.js and Prisma. The way Wasp handles routes and authentication was a game-changer.

“Just putting routes in main.wasp makes everything super simple. Auth works seamlessly, too.”

Focus on Building: By handling repetitive setup tasks like setting up payment integrations or making admin dashboards, Open SaaS allowed Ricardo to focus on core features.
Adaptability: regardless of the idea he had - a full-fledged SaaS, or a Google add-on which needed a robust-backend and a dashboard, he was able to build the app with Open SaaS boilerplate starter.

“I didn’t feel limited by the boilerplate—it’s flexible and gets out of the way.”

Ricardo’s Projects Built with Wasp

Ricardo started a few projects with Wasp, while working on the third one he started before discovering Open SaaS.

Article Generator

Built in less than 7 days.
40+ paying customers.

This tool simplifies content creation for businesses by generating SEO-friendly blog posts with AI. Article Generator is competing in a crowded market of AI writing tools, where each tool claims that it’s the best one on the market.

Ricardo is using Open SaaS to focus on feature development while testing pricing strategies to differentiate the product from the rest of the market. Integrations with Stripe, Open AI, and similar helped him move faster than he could on his own. His first clients came from Reddit and he has a standard subscription monetization set up.

⭐️ Star the Open SaaS repo and support tools that help you build fast!

Meeting Reminders

Bult in less than 7 days.
400+ paying customers.

This tool is a Google Workspace add-on that reduces no-shows by automating pre-meeting reminders. His competitive edge is that he covers WhatsApp alongside SMS and email reminders. Meeting Reminders app shows how versatile Open SaaS boilerplate is, because it can handle edge cases like this one and integrate into Google’s system.

Calls being skipped was a huge pain for Ricardo when he was working at a VC company. His day would include a lot of calls, and the cancellation rate was high. Once he started emailing participants before the call, the number of cancellations reduced significantly. Some time later, he built the tool himself to automate this 😃

In this case, Open SaaS handles backend tasks like subscription checks and authentication. Because of that, this is a lightweight app that solves a niche problem effectively, and doesn’t require a lot of maintenance.

The first users were people he knew personally, and he did a bit of promotion on targeted groups on Slack and Discord. Since it’s a Google Marketplace app, anyone looking for Meeting Reminder add-on will have a chance to see it.

He also relies on SEO, and guess what, he pushed a couple of blog posts with his first SaaS, AI Article Generator. As he said before, you should make tools that scratch your itch first. 😃

Tips for Builders Launching Products

Validate Before You Build

“Start by searching Reddit or similar platforms to find out if people are already solving the problem. If they are, ask yourself: can I do it better or faster?”

Diversify Launch Strategies

Avoid relying solely on Product Hunt

“It’s not as effective as it used to be.”

Explore short-form content like TikTok for quick validation. You can create a company account and post videos that showcase the problem and the solution.

@meetingreminders
BOOOM!! no more waiting in meetings - it’s called Meeting Reminders #workmeeting #corporate #workfromhome #googlemeet
♬ original sound - Meeting Reminders

“Their algorithm is great for targeting the right audience.”

Use targeted Reddit ads to reach niche communities.

Start small

“If you’re entering a competitive space, start small. Validate your product’s unique edge by solving specific pain points and adjust based on user feedback.”

Iterate Quickly

“Launch fast, gather feedback, and refine your product. You don’t need to build the perfect app on day one—get it out there, see how people use it, and adjust.”

Ready to Build Your SaaS?

Explore the Open SaaS boilerplate to see how you can kickstart your SaaS today.

⭐️ Star the Open SaaS repo and support tools that help you build fast!

TurboReel: An Open Source AI Video Generator Built With Open SaaS

Dec 10, 2024

Milica

Growth @ Wasp

Peter is the creator of TurboReel, an open-source platform with a paid SaaS layer, that transforms how creators generate short-form video content. With just a prompt, users can produce polished TikToks and YouTube Shorts in moments.

But like any SaaS founder, Peter faced the challenge of turning his vision into reality without getting bogged down in repetitive technical setup. That’s where Wasp’s Open SaaS boilerplate came in.

In this post, we’ll cover three main things: what inspired Peter to kickstart the project, how he chose the tech stack to build on, and finally, how he made his first $100. Let’s dive in!

The Starting Point: Open SaaS Boilerplate

Peter’s journey to Open SaaS began with a simple Google search for SaaS boilerplates.

“I was looking for something that could save me time,” Peter recalls. “I came across a few options—some were free but basic, and others were paid but didn’t feel worth it. Then I found Wasp’s Open SaaS boilerplate.”

What stood out to Peter wasn’t just that it was free, but that it was open source. “I liked the idea of building on something maintained by a community, not locked behind a paywall”, he says. Intrigued, Peter explored Wasp further and discovered an engaging community that offered exactly what he needed to start building TurboReel.

Here’s a video presenting Open SaaS, generated with TurboReel 🐝

TurboReel’s Tech Stack

TurboReel lets users generate short explainer videos with minimal effort. Starting with a single text prompt describing the video’s purpose (e.g. “Create a video on building your SaaS with OpenSaaS”), you can produce professional grade TikTok and YT shorts without needing any video editing skills.

The platform’s open-source foundation unlocks development potential, while the paid SaaS layer helps with funding.

The tech behind TurboReel looks like this:

Open SaaS - a free, open-source React & Node.js SaaS starter
- powered by Wasp, a full stack web framework for JS.
- Combines React for the frontend and Node.js for backend.
- Prisma handles the database.
OpenAI
- Used for generating scripts and scenes in the videos.
Pollinations
- Open-source platform for image and text generation.
- Provides creative assets to enhance video quality.
Revideo
- Library for programmatic video creation.
- Replaces the previously used MoviePy.

Building faster with Open SaaS boilerplate

“The first thing that impressed me with Open SaaS was how much time it saved, I could start with wasp new saas and immediately have a functioning boilerplate. It gave me the foundation I needed to focus on my product, not the setup.”

The boilerplate included everything he needed:

Authentication via email, GitHub and Google
Running background jobs via pg-boss
Database management
Frontend-backend communication via a type-safe RPC layer
Deployment of the app with a single CLI command

One feature that particularly stood out was Wasp’s deployment commands.

“Usually, deployment takes time to set up properly, but with Wasp, it was as simple as running wasp deploy fly deploy.”

Here’s what Wasp’s config file looks like, through which you can define full-stack auth in a Wasp app.

app myApp {
  wasp: {
    version: "^0.15.0"
  },
  title: "My App",
  auth: {
    // 1. Specify the User entity
    userEntity: User,
    methods: {
      // 2. Enable Github Auth
      gitHub: {},
      email: {
        // 3. Specify the email from field
        fromField: {
          name: "My App Postman",
          email: "hello@itsme.com"
        },
        // 4. Specify the email verification and password reset options
        emailVerification: {
          clientRoute: EmailVerificationRoute
        },
        passwordReset: {
          clientRoute: PasswordResetRoute
        },
      },
    },
    onAuthFailedRedirectTo: "/login"
  },
}

⭐️ Star Open SaaS repo and support tools that help you build fast!

Out-of-the-box Stripe integration

Another significant advantage for Peter was how Open SaaS handled third-party integrations. Setting up services like Stripe for payments often requires a lot of effort, but Wasp’s OpenSaaS streamlined the process - you just need to add your API key and you’re good to go.

“Payments are usually a huge headache, but Open SaaS made it so smooth. I didn’t have to spend weeks integrating Stripe—it just worked. That gave me more time to focus on TurboReel’s core functionality.”

The power of open source

Both TurboReel and Wasp share a commitment to open source.

“The video generation space is complex. There aren’t many established solutions for what I’m trying to do. By making TurboReel open source, I’m inviting smart people to collaborate and help push the project forward.”

Getting first users

Peter found interesting subreddits on Reddit and shared his product with users. He enabled everyone to sign up and create a few videos, to get feedback quite early. Lots of people in the creator community loved it, and based off of their feedback, he iterated furthermore improving the UI and the workflow.

Within a few days, he was able to get first paying customers, which proved that his MVP was going in the right direction. Plans for the future? The sky is the limit!

Ready to Build Your SaaS?

Get started with Wasp today, or explore the Open SaaS boilerplate to see how it can work for you.

indiehackers

About us - launched 6x, >2,000 upvotes

Scheduling your launch and creating a “Coming soon” teaser - “let’s exchange upvotes”

Launch day - unsolicited emails and “buy upvotes” offers

First 4 hours of the day - hidden upvotes

”Hey, wanna buy some upvotes?”

What we got from the launch - #7, HN front page, trending on GitHub, …

The resulting traffic

Getting featured in PH’s daily newsletter - does it help?

Is it even possible to win #1 of the day without any boosting strategies?

So, what does all this mean? Is it still worth launching on Product Hunt?

Product Hunt is an amazing excuse

We keep it simple

We do it often

Thanks for reading!

The problem: Managing prompts is messy

The opportunity: Everyone uses prompts, not just devs

Launching is unpredictable: Product Hunt hits and flops

Choosing the right stack for developing your SaaS app

Are you ready to ship your SaaS now?

Why Ricardo Chose Open SaaS

Ricardo’s Projects Built with Wasp

Article Generator

Meeting Reminders

Tips for Builders Launching Products

Ready to Build Your SaaS?

The Starting Point: Open SaaS Boilerplate

TurboReel’s Tech Stack

Building faster with Open SaaS boilerplate

Out-of-the-box Stripe integration

The power of open source

Getting first users

Ready to Build Your SaaS?