Resilience, Rise of AI and ProductHunt Insights
Insights from 30K+ products listed in ProductHunt, Evolution of LLM and more.
Hey everyone, hope you're all doing well. It's been an exciting and challenging week as I continue to build few ideas and bring them into reality. I've been reading a lot about resilience lately and how it's such an important quality for founders to have. Building a startup is indeed a real test of resilience.
Building a startup is like trekking through unchartered dense forest. You are walking without knowing where the path is going to lead you. The only choice is to keep walking in the chosen direction.
This week is about ProductHunt. I launched my product 2 weeks back and got more than 100 votes and few signups. Not bad for the first time. With curiosity, I looked ways to look at the trends. I came across the ProductHunt APIs which provides access to their product data. I spent next day to integrate and fetch all the product launches since Jan 2022.
Here you can find the basic analysis on the data. You can download the Product Hunt data for free and analyse yourself. Please share the insights in comments so that I can add them.
There are about 10,612 products launched in 2022 and trending at 4636 products till April 15, 2023 grown at 136% compared to 1964 products launched in first 4 months of 2022. For every product launched in 2022, there are 2 products which were created but not featured. So about 13K creators got cold feet and never clicked on publish.
Now for the popular myth, “You need a top hunter to hunt your product to be at top”. The data shows that it is possible to be product of the day even it is created by the maker. But the product hunted by top hunters get an average of 200 votes. So if you can know a hunter, it makes sense but do not delay your launch for finding a perfect hunter.
Coming to next myth of weekday vs weekend launching, There is no trend which shows you will get lesser votes on weekend. There are fewer products launched in weekend and average votes per launch stays almost the same (variance of ~10%). If you are an indie developer, I would even suggest to launch in weekend as no big companies plan their launch in a weekend.
One of the unsurprising trend is the rise of AI. 400+ products were launched in March 2023 alone. There has been a sharp rise in launches of products with AI capability since launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022
AI as category has become the largest in 2023 surpassing the Productivity category based on the product launched. Web3 as a category is not to be seen in the top 10 in 2023.
Based on the followers count, Productivity is still the largest with 592K followers and AI at 5th place with 407K followers as of April 15 2023.
There are key trends based on the Votes and pattern of users. Due to the rate limiting restriction, I am still in the process of gathering information about votes so it will be for another post.
Few key Takeaways from this data,
Hunt yourself: Prioritise speed and positioning over finding the perfect hunter.
Consider publishing on the weekend: Because there are typically fewer people publishing on weekends, you have a higher chance of attracting attention. The average vote difference between the days are almost negligible.
AI is trending and it’s gaining strength with Productivity as ever popular category in Product hunt.
Few things to be stay on top,
The whole LLM space is evolving so fast and it is difficult to keep up with the pace. It is almost getting scary. Check out this video on how the maker is able to make two ChatGPT agent collaborate with itself and create applications. Very powerful stuff. Note to self: It’s time to learn how to program AI systems or get obsolete.
Serverless Generative AI API war begins: AWS has launched API for building generative AI applications using foundational models. Read more here
The first Open source LLM model trained in less than $30 and licensed for research and commercial use. It is not perfect yet but it is not going to be long before it catches up.
The wave of AI integrations to applications is imminent and world as we know it is going to change forever. Exciting times are ahead as AI continues to be integrated into more and more of our life. Hopefully we will not have machines take over and create Matrix in our lifetime. Thanks for reading and signing off.