rogansage

Product Hunt CEO defends decision to hand-pick only 10 products to be on the Product Hunt Homepage for the whole day, effectively reducing visibility for non-featured products on the site by >90%.

Rajiv Ayyangar, the CEO, claims that "no one wants to sift through 200 products per day" ... "it would be impossible for a good product to rise on its own merits", but users say this has effectively made it impossible for good products that aren't one of the ten selected by his team, to rise on their own merits - and undermines the whole system of voting.

The criteria for 'featured' selection remains vague, and the community is letting Product Hunt's CEO know how it feels on Twitter. His response to those who his team did not select to be featured, Ayyangar suggests: "Build better products."

What do you think of a solution where it's headless (i.e bring your own charts / components) but with a no-code builder that gives you the benefits of an off-the-shelf tool to manage and update easily? (that's what we're building at embeddable.com)

Building free tools alone is not a viable LT strategy, you need to market any tool (even the free ones) to get traction and usage. If you rely on SEO, you need to clearly demonstrate to Google that this is the best page for a search query (or set of) -- this is't very obvious to google if the value is not textual so this needs to be worked on to complement it (then you need backlinks too... the marathon begins).

I would question whether the 'ad-free' element of the strategy is potentially only a very small and ultimately insignificant weight in the perceived value of your tool vs others and might not be as impactful as you'd think -- if you deliver enough value for people not to care about having to ignore ads (which ppl are very, very good at these days) then they will confidently ignore the ads and find the value (e.g. academic referencing tools, wetransfer, {filetype}-to-{filetype} convertors)

Embeddable, a headless SaaS tool for building fully-custom analytics with full code control, wins 2024 Data Breakthrough Award as Embedded Analytics tool of the year 2024.

I completely agree! What we're trying to build is a solution for other companies (not to build it for our own app) that hits that sweet spot in the middle - i.e. one that allows companies which currently have to make the trade off between the whole shooting match and the axel adapter... where they can build the bits they need to customise and buy the stuff they don't

Do you think a best of both worlds solution would be valuable? (even if not immediately obvious how it could be possible!)

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=stripe+analytics+new&tbm=isc...

What I mean by this is that you've got a number of out-of the box graph types, with their own limitations. You can't access the code to actually change them.

Say you wanted to build Stripes new analytics [1] you'd need to build those yourself with all the subcomponents and layout within each component to have your own style and native feel. The percentage increase subcomponent alone for example will have a bunch of it's own properties (colour, size, shading, edges, race conditions, position within parent component, etc.) AND will have a specific data request to pull it back.

So I guess the question is, does it matter if it looks like your platform or not?

Correct - an analytics tool wouldn't solve for this need. I'm interested in finding a better solution to how to build analytics experiences in your own app for your customers (whether that's a simple dashboard or an interactive experience)

Do you think a charting library is enough of a solution? As I understand you would still be required to do all the heavy lifting I mentioned above of building analytics from scratch, save for giving you a head start on the components themselves - right?

Thanks warrenm! - it sounds like the issue I describe is one that you've seen smart people come up against. Would a fair description of a perfect tool in your mind then be something like:

A analytics experience that A) looks like a nicely integrated part of our platform and, B) which doesn't force us to spend millions of developer hours, user feedback, etc to get it working

This I think would be an 'ideal solution' - if we could achieve that with what we're building do you think it would be useful or would there be more problems you'd foresee?

Thanks for the reply @Ibriner! - you're right, there's usually an iframe and a javascript option with tools like PowerBI/Looker etc. Still the problem of inflexibility remains with any third-party tool I've found.

On the topic of sticking to the things you're good at. Would you be interested in a solution that allowed you all the flexibility to build a fully-native-looking experience for your customers whilst handling things like building components, localisation, and all of the boring bits for you?

The capacity has been expanded so you should be able to get in now! And there will be more events. If you sign up to the event page, we'll let everyone know about future events :)

The event capacity has been expanded now - if you want to join it should be possible from the event page :)

Open attendance :)