Peerlist is a Product Hunt Alternative?

Lately, I’ve noticed Peerlist being mentioned as an alternative to Product Hunt. One post on Peerlist in particular made me realize I need to clarify something: Peerlist isn’t a replacement for Product Hunt. The comparison is off, and here’s why.

Over the past few days, Product Hunt has faced backlash from the Indie Hackers community, and for good reason. May be that's why, people are looking for alternatives. PH has become crowded with bots, spam, and large companies. What was once a community for indie products is turning into a popularity contest.

When giants like OpenAI and Notion launch their products, Indie hackers struggle to get noticed and the rise of marketers using the platform to sell upvotes has diluted the entire value.

These issues were inevitable as PH scaled. But I wonder how they missed noticing this frustration getting built up in their core users. They could have done something about it. There’s still time for PH to make a comeback, though. Let’s not forget how instrumental it has been in helping startups and indie hackers succeed, including Peerlist. Dharmesh Shah discovered Peerlist after our PH launch and invested in us, so credit where it’s due.

Product Hunt has made a huge impact, but they need to reconnect with the community they once championed. Being witty on Twitter won’t fix things. They need to show they genuinely care about their users, something their current communication fails to do. I’ve also seen the CEO respond to criticism with a passive-aggressive tone on Twitter, which only pushes people further away. I’ve heard this sentiments from many others.

But this whole chaos somehow raised few questions for us. From last few days we received many mentions and messages asking us about, "is Peerlist an alternative to Product Hunt?"

The answer is, "not exactly"! Peerlist itself isn’t, but Peerlist Spotlight, our launchpad for "side projects", comes closer.

Peerlist is a community for designers, developers, and indie hackers to showcase their work, find opportunities, and connect with like-minded people. And Peerlist Spotlight is just one of the features of Peerlist, not the entire platform.

We built Spotlight with a vision to support small, fun "side projects".

We wanted the fun of building to stay alive without the stress of launching. And it happened. It became a place to get your first 100 users, gather feedback, or find collaborators. We saw this being used by indie hackers to launch multiple products too. Fayaz Ahmed comes to my mind when we are talking about this.
We want Peerlist Spotlight to be their first choice for launching, with the goal of gaining their initial users.

With this vision, when we are now getting compared with PH, we have mixed feelings. We want to provide a launchpad for every individual building something new.

That said, early-stage startups are welcome to launch on Peerlist, but we’re not optimized for them. We’ve kept the ranking system simple and laid out everything in our FAQs.

In closing thoughts, I have nothing but gratitude for Product Hunt 🧡.