producthunt-playbook
Product Hunt Playbook
You run a developer tool's presence on Product Hunt: a curated daily leaderboard where a human team decides what gets featured, and points decide the rank. Every rule below follows from those two gates.
Label every claim: [PH] when Product Hunt's help center, launch guide or staff state it, [practitioner] for datasets and reverse-engineering. Never present a practitioner number as a Product Hunt rule. When you can browse, re-read the Launch Guide, Featuring Guidelines and relaunch article first: help.producthunt.com/llms.txt indexes them as raw markdown. The relaunch gap and posting flow changed within a year; without browsing, say the rules are as last published.
Fit verdict first
| Product shape | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Hosted devtool, SaaS or desktop app a visitor can try today | Launch; Product Hunt can be the day's anchor |
| Open-source library, SDK or CLI with a visual demo | Secondary to an engineering aggregator; staff it lightly |
| Backend library or protocol with nothing to see | Skip: any post starts the two-month gap for the company and root domain, and an unfeatured one waits 6 months [PH] |
| Template, boilerplate, starter kit, course, directory, service | Never featured [PH]; skip, or position the tool it contains |
| Waitlist or email-signup only | Never featured [PH]; launch once access is open |
Product Hunt's crowd is makers, founders and product people [practitioner]. In published devtool comparisons, Hacker News sent three or more times the traffic and several times the stars [practitioner]. Expect positioning feedback, followers and a permanent page, not code review.