Product Hunt is a website/platform which lets users share their own products and discover other products. Users can comment and vote (upvote and downvote) various products which they think are useful or not. A product with the most upvotes in a day reaches the top of the list for that day. Simply put, the more attractive and useful a product is, means the better the chance for it to be discovered by other users.
While Product Hunt began its journey in 2013, it might surprise a lot of people if they learnt that Product Hunt started earning revenue only in 2018. Product Hunt solely focused on building and managing a quality community on their platform by constantly curating and moderating their user base. Once the community is in place, Product Hunt focused on a revenue model and considering the number of users they have on their platform, the revenue models which will be listed out below makes perfect sense.
Revenue Models
Ship
Ship is one the major offerings Product Hunt has on their website. Ship is basically a product for makers to build an audience for their product. Ship operates on a freemium model while also providing paid services which offer the buyer more flexibility and services. Some of the important features provided by Ship include
- Landing pages: fully customizable landing pages which look beautiful and lets a user build their audience immediately.
- Embeddable widgets: embeddable widgets are used to create a buzz and collect leads using the email form, get answers using surveys widget, or chat with the visitors (individually and/or in group.)
- Surveys and targeting: The pro version offers tools to conduct surveys, direct messaging and group messaging options.
Ship comes in three different offerings plus two different plans (yearly and monthly.) The three offerings are Basic, Pro and Super Pro. Each service tier has its own offerings with the Super Pro offering the most services. Users can also choose to pay for these plans on a monthly or yearly basis and paying for the annual plan also comes with a $ 7,500 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits.
Promoted Products:
With a huge user base which is highly active already in place, promoting products make perfect sense. Product Hunt offers to promote products and lets the maker/user get their product in front of the tech community and reach out to millions of founders, investors and reporters every month.
However only one product is promoted per day on Product Hunt. Dates have to be reserved in advance. Prices are not fixed and vary according to the market demand and can go upto $ 4,000. Only products that have launched on Product Hunt in the past can be promoted. Promoted Products is designed to resurface popular products from the past, giving makers another opportunity to be rediscovered.
Promoted Jobs:
Product Hunt has a wide rage of talented individuals and creators who are listing their products on the platform. This means head hunters could use the platform to hire some really great resources. Product Hunt lets companies post jobs on their platform for a fee of $ 299 per month or $ 199 per month if a company chooses the three month plan. Jobs are displayed for thirty days on the jobs page.
Product Hunt Deals:
Product makers can make use of this feature to introduce exclusive discounts for the Product Hunt community in the comments of their product launch. These discounts often garner a lot of interest in the product as well as the adoption of the product by users. These deals can be viewed on a separate page on their main website. Makers could make use of this feature by signing up for the Founder’s Club and paying a fee. Joining the Founder Club will give makers access to all current and future deals for a whole year.
The fee is charged at $ 60 per month or can be taken annually for a fee of $ 720 per year.
Apart from these features there are a host of several other interesting features like the one which lets makers advertise their product on various platforms like email newsletters and podcasts.
One interesting feature is the ‘time travel’ page which lets a user select a date and year to see what products made it to the top list for that particular day in the past. The upcoming feature lets users see popular upcoming products on Product Hunt.
Let us know in the comments section if you have ever browsed Product Hunt or will do it because you read our article!
