Show HN: A fair Product Hunt alternative

Show HN: A fair Product Hunt alternative simplelister.com/...

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been developing Simple Lister, a platform built to support indie product creators and give them a fair shot. If you’ve launched on Product Hunt recently, you might have noticed that only featured products get the spotlight, while others struggle for visibility.

Why Simple Lister?

Simple Lister aims to fix this by offering a more transparent and fair approach for product launches. Here’s how we do it:

• No favoritism: Every product gets an equal chance, and we don’t play favorites.

• Daily Underdog Feature: Each day, we highlight one underdog product to give them extra visibility and support.

• No hidden fees: There are no surprise costs. We have a simple submission fee, and that’s it—no pay-to-play or hidden charges.

Also we have a long to do list to do better.

Why does this matter?

After launching on Product Hunt ourselves, we realized how tough it is for smaller creators to get any attention unless they’re featured. Simple Lister is here to champion those indie products that deserve to be seen by a wider audience.

The platform is new and evolving, and I’m constantly working to make it better. If you’ve got feedback or questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Thanks for your support, and I’d be happy if you submit your products!

I get why you see the need for this product. However, as someone who launched on PH and got featured w/ a team of two and no financial backers, I think the point is that it should not be easy to get featured.

PH does a great job of putting filters in place to ensure only the 'best' (whether by polish, value prop, or combo of both) products end up making it to the top. It really forces makers to put their absolute best foot forward when launching.

purple-leafy · a year ago

Not true at all. Top of product hunt features the products that spam people for upvotes the most, or already have the most social media followers.

Nothing to do with polish

denizhdzh · a year ago

I get your point, but the issue with PH’s new algorithm is that it tends to feature only certain products, regardless of effort. Simple Lister isn’t about making things easier, it’s about giving everyone an equal chance to be seen, no matter their resources. It’s about fairness, not lowering the bar.

maeil · a year ago

How long ago was this? Have you read this [1]?

[1] https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots

serial_dev · a year ago

> No favoritism: Every product gets an equal chance, and we don’t play favorites.

> Daily Underdog Feature: Each day, we highlight one underdog product to give them extra visibility and support.

Aren’t these contradictory statements?

Nope :) The underdog project is selected from projects with fewer than a certain number of upvotes. The system filters them and randomly picks one each day.

treefarmer · a year ago

But then you have a paid "featured" tier, along with a leaderboard showing the most upvoted ones. How is this different from ProductHunt in the end? Isn't it still pay to win?

jemmyw · a year ago

Aren't you introducing a bias by having upvotes? Why do you need upvotes for this kind of listing? The number of people clicking is a bad metric imo, you're rewarding people who can organize getting votes. Other kinds of categorization would be more interesting. I'd like to see this kind of site without the popularity metric being forefront.

We didn’t set this up as a competition; today’s products are always sorted randomly. We’re also developing a new system where you won’t be able to choose which products to view, we’ll randomly select them for you, and you won’t have access to see all launch products at once.

gremlinsinc · a year ago

i'd like to see some sort of site like this with a way to base it off things like stripe earnings, actual subscribers via callback, or people who are actually using it, and actual reviews people who review are more likely to have used it unless they are paid (there's always a way to cheat the system i guess)... maybe other factors too like shares on twitter, etc...

sarora27 · a year ago

nhatcher · a year ago

Submitted my little side project IronCalc.

One thing it was difficult is that it wasn't clear what fields in the form had an error. So I didn't know what to modify to make the submit button clickable. It actually took me a bit to realize there might be something wrong in one of the inputs.

Thanks!!!

Hey! Thanks for your feedback! I will do some fixing to clearity asap.

andrewstuart · a year ago

I spent 15 minute filling in the product submit form and when I hit submit it said "please refresh the page" and of course when I did so everything I had entered was gone.

Also, my product does not take 150 characters to describe.

Sorry about that :( I don't know the cause but I will check it! The 150-character limit is in place to help users searching for products on the site understand them better.

tclayborne · a year ago

I'm not sure if this is a wonderfully "me" thing, but it's a behavior I see a lot on these types of sites. Long pressing links (for opening in background or such) doesn't seem to work on Safari (iPhone 14 Pro, iOS 18.1 dev beta 22B5054e). If it's helpful, I spend immensely more time browsing sites like this where the long pressing action does work. @denizhdzh

croisillon · a year ago

you're correct it doesn't work ; some of axios.com stories are linked that way as well, it's irritating

6DM · a year ago

How is Zscaler an underdog of the day? This doesn't seem fair from the start.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ZS/key-statistics/

Because of underdog feature is new, it is just a placeholder. Tomorrow, in 12.01am the first underdog will be appeared

Oh, I'm surprised you didn't find a startup to list instead :)

laughing_snyder · a year ago

Some minor feedback regarding UI/UX. When I go to your landing page (https://simplelister.com) I cannot open any of the "Today's Products" in a new tab (tested on Firefox and Chrome). So when I hover over a product and the background of that HTML element changes to a light gray, I cannot right-click "Open in new tab" or use the middle mouse button to open that link. I cannot quickly open multiple products.

Yes! It was a bug, not on purpose. It will be fixed today, thank you for your kind feedback