Product Hunt discontinued coming soon / teaser pages. Did they work for you?
I noticed that Product Hunt discontinued the teaser / coming soon section this week, and I’m curious if it did help you build genuine traction?
My take (from hunting PH launches):
I usually recommended finalizing launch assets before publishing/scheduling on PH rather than relying on teasers. A few reasons why:
PH moderators have mentioned teaser traction isn’t considered when deciding which products get featured.
Even if 1,000+ people hit “Notify Me,” you’ll still want to nudge your friends / community on the launch day.
The teaser page is slightly useful to onboard friends/colleagues new to PH, but beyond that its value is limited.
A big risk: Teasers required scheduling first, so teams often upload assets piecemeal. PH mods can review early, and incomplete pages hurt your chances of being featured.
The teaser post doesn’t allow links, so your landing or waitlist page isn’t accessible to the community.
Many makers share both their teaser and launch post, creating two “asks” without offering much value in return.
There was no way to access the list of users who clicked "Notify me" button for your launch.
In short, my pov is, PH is super fun with or without the coming soon section.
That’s my perspective, but I’d love to hear from the community here :)
P.S. BTW, two launches I found interesting on leaderboard today:
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Similarly to you I woke up today to the surprise that my "Notify me" page for Uxia had disappeared...
After checking, I realised that the entire Coming Soon page was missing and, after speaking with CS (props to Juan who is always very helpful), I confirmed that the feature was discontinued.
Personally, I found it quite helpful as it allowed me to direct our pre-launch efforts to a specific page and gauge the impact, measured by the Notifies. Of course, I would have loved to change some key elements of that page, but I was surprised to see it removed...
PH team (if you are reading this) are there any plans to revamp it? If so, I'd love to share some feedback :D
@borja_diazroig I totally agree. Is PH replacing the page with a new way of promoting an upcoming launch? Looking forward to seeing what the development here is
@a_s71 apparently they are not for now based on their CTO answer
@borja_diazroig @a_s71 Hey Alicia, imagine this... when you're preparing for your launch, you're likely to ask your PH friends to click the notify me if they are interested to follow the launch.
Later, when you launch, you would still want to reach out to your PH friends seeking their feedback.
That's like making two 'asks' without anything immediately valuable for them.
What do you think?
@borja_diazroig Do you know PH had a feature called Product Hunt Ship. It was a paid feature (now discontinued) that let makers build an audience and community before launching their product.
It worked like a pre-launch landing page + email marketing tool. You were able to send emails to those who signup for your upcoming launch.
PH shut it down around 2020–2021, since many founders preferred using dedicated tools like Carrd, Mailchimp, or ConvertKit for pre-launch marketing.
@borja_diazroig yes, teaser / coming soon / notify me pages were implemented after Ship was discontinued. :)
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Chiming in. Thanks for the post @rohanrecommends. @borja_diazroig, no plans to revamp Coming Soon. This was a very old surface area that was quite buggy. And, per @kate_ramakaieva, comment: rallying an audience twice is rough.
We are very much thinking of alternatives to Coming Soon!
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@borja_diazroig @kate_ramakaieva @mikekerzhner Mike, reading the comments here it seems some users want coming soon page back or an alternative to it.
If the PH team is thinking of alternatives, maybe it will be a good idea to bring back Ship. It used to be a paid feature but it was super useful. The Makers were able to get email IDs and send emails to their pre-launch list.
Oh wow.
Comms from Product Hunt sucks.
I've advised many makers to use teaser pages because it helps you pre-announce your launch to your audience/community, and to build momentum ahead of the launch.
Even if you got a small number of people to sign up ahead of launch via your teaser, you could count on Product Hunt to email them on launch day to remind them to come support the launch.
I have no idea if that method actually generated results, but it was a workflow that was pretty straightforward and low risk.
Now it's unclear how makers can spread the word in advance of their launch.
I imagine this would further hurt homepage engagement, but I guess time will tell.
Very disappointed that there wasn't more of a warning before the page was retired.
Product Hunt might as well retire their Changelog too since it's clear they're no longer maintaining it. 😐
@chrismessina I guess less is more...
@chrismessina Hey Chris!
Do you remember Product Hunt Ship? The Ship page actually allowed the Makers to collect emails and send emails to those interested in the product before or when it launched. However, the teaser pages don't even allow Makers to see who clicked the Notify Me button.
I think the platform auto-silenced notifications to the Notify Me list if a product wasn't featured. (I am not sure about this though, I have heard it from the Makers. There could be a bug)
I doubt homepage engagement will drop, since relaunches automatically notify past supporters and followers.
I wish PH still maintained a Changelog. A while back, I used to share new features and updates I noticed as a user/hunter on PH Discussions. But when @rajiv_ayyangar took over and started publishing the Changelog posts, I stopped. Maybe I’ll start again until the team brings it back.
Some posts I had published:
Product Hunt redesigned discussions with Reddit-style forums
New on Product Hunt — Header Images, Product Hub UI, Discussion Post Topics
New on Product Hunt — Search Discussions
New on Product Hunt — Hunter Invite Link
New on Product Hunt — Enhanced Launch-Day Dashboard!
New on Product Hunt — New Launch Post UI
@busmark_w_nika used to help post similar updates whenever she saw something changed on PH. :)
@rohanrecommends I definitely recommend Ship! Maybe it's time to revive that in place of Teasers...!
I also nudged @rajiv_ayyangar on maintaining the Changelog and he indicated he'd do a better job on it.
In the meantime, perhaps you should revive your series! 🫧
On the other hand, I noticed a very extensive footer:
@busmark_w_nika I guess they are working on their SEO strategy. Spreading the juice to low authority pages.
@vladimir_zivkovic It is possible, do you think it will help with AI SEO?
@busmark_w_nika yes, slightly overwhelming, but I like it!
@busmark_w_nika I've noticed this huge new category component too. It's clearly a key part of the site now, since it loads with high priority and shows up on so many pages (notifications, profiles, etc.).
Frankly, I think it's very useful for browsing and broad product discovery.
However, I did notice that many of these new categories don't seem to be synced with the selectable topics available when you're creating a launch. For example, the footer has a great, very detailed breakdown of AI categories. But when you go to the launch page to add topics to a product, those specific sub-categories aren't there, you can still only find the broad "Artificial Intelligence" topic.
I'm not sure if the plan is to sync these new categories with the launch topics automatically, or if they are being manually curated by the editors. I would recommend the first option, because having the team manually categorize every product would create a huge operational workload.
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It is ironic because I just submitted to Coming Soon! the day before it was discontinued, but I believe if it doesn't really factor into featuring then what is the point?
@gamer456148 Product Hunt once had the Ship feature, which let makers collect emails and send custom updates directly to their list. It was a paid feature and it was discontinued.
The new teaser page was free but limited in usefulness.
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@rohanrecommends Yeah, I liked the Ship feature to be quite honest. Compared to paid advertising and other options, I feel like it was way better ROI.
Without a teaser page it is unclear how to promote the launch before it happens.
@tmtabor I think the best way is to just build a network, offer value to them in some capacity... either through your product or giving feedback to other makers in the community. You can keep in touch with your PH friends on LinkedIn or X.
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@kate_ramakaieva Exactly. Not to mention, the teaser post doesn’t allow links, so your landing or waitlist page isn’t accessible to the community.
You're right! Many makers share both their teaser and launch post, creating two “asks” without offering much value in return.
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i was suprised and i am sad that they discontinued them
@kshitij_mishra4 Maybe there wasn't enough engagement in the coming soon section from the utility standpoint of the platform.
Thanks for this update and the opportunity to see how others leveraged the teaser or didn't. It's great to be able to prebuild and review, and also great not to be concerned about being penalized for pages in progress.
@dmitcha An alternative to PH teaser pages could be maintaining a pre-launch waitlist on your own website or a personal CRM of supporters, customers and friends.
@rohanrecommends Yes, our marketing list can be expanded with this specific ask on our end. Also, this post got me reading a lot of innovative launch promotions on Reddit. A great topic and thread, thanks!
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I thought it was useful from time to time. I'd hit notify weeks ahead and get the notification midday during the launch. most of the time, I had forgotten about it. It's also tough to reach out to hundreds of people alone on launch day so building the notify list leading up to the launch helped a bit. Of course, people can do this with a simple landing page instead & have much more control over the design and retain the contact list which the notify page wouldn't allow.
It was also nice to see what was coming up if you were timing your launch and not overlap a huge launch from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Apple, etc... I guess it's more of a mystery/gamble now.
Do you think they'll bring it back in some way or is it gone forever?
@anthony_latona Hey Anthony,
The big tech launches almost never created teaser pages.
Significant percentage of the products that are featured skip creating teasers.
If the product is not featured, the teaser page notifications probably gets silenced.
Even if you do not click the notify me, you would know when a product launches by visiting the homepage daily.
If enough community members want it back, maybe it will return with some upgrades. But chances are slim as it wasn't used / visited enough.
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@rohanrecommends I think the absence of certain launches using it doesn't invalidate the usefulness of the tool for the launches that did. It'd be interesting to see actual stats on ratio of launches that used it and how useful it was. I assumed it was a relatively high percentage. Do you have any stats about big launches, featured launches, etc...? Or is it anecdotal (like my view)?
It'd also be interesting to see how many people on the notify list ended up interacting on launch day and all and if that interaction came from the notify email.
...and sure you can come to the site every day, but that isn't a replacement for a reminder. That's like saying you can stare at the clock instead of having an alarm.
Is there any reason that you're particularly happy that the feature was dropped? It never seemed to hurt to have it available... I wonder what the reason was to remove it.
@anthony_latona Hey Anthony, those are good points, thanks for sharing. The analytics and numbers would be with the PH team.
My conclusion comes from observing ~300 launches I hunted and those that are hunted by regular hunters like me.
I have edited and updated the forum post with more points on why I felt teaser pages were not useful.
To be honest it was a double job, sharing the link with your circle and then having to remind everyone that launch is live because not so many people actually open the PH email notification. I don't think anything will change without the coming soon page, the job of marketing your launch remains the same.
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I thought there was an error on my end, so I even asked my teammates, "Can you not see it either?"
I'm not sure yet if this is a good or bad thing, but it's an undeniable fact that a feature is gone.
It might be a small feature, but it definitely changes the preparation process for teams getting ready to launch.
Will a new feature appear?
I guess I'll have to look forward to the great plan PH have in store.
Metabase
Oh wow, really surprised to hear they got rid of 'Coming soon' and teaser pages. I found it pretty instrumental in promoting our launch early, and I'm also found them cool as a user to see what's coming up or if someone asked to support. I can't remember anything without a 'notify me' button :D
Interesting perspective on the 'two asks', I hadn't thought about it that way, but makes sense.
This just makes sense.
@Product Hunt isn't just a launch platform. It's also a search engine, a newsletter, and a Reddit-like platform. They're transitioning into a social media company.
@howell4change I need to do a refresh on which tips?
I never received any notifications whenever I clicked on the "notify me" button.
This is really terrible news. Honestly.
A major part of our campaigns was built around the teaser page.
Not for any other reason, but because we always kicked off our marketing weeks ahead of the actual launch. That’s how people found out about the campaign. That’s how many new users signed up.
And now this completely shifts the focus.
Pretty disappointing. Especially with no advance notice about this change.
Completely agree, teasers never tell the full story. Finalizing launch assets first definitely makes a bigger impact. Curious how others here plan pre-launch engagement now that the teaser section is gone!