Two Audiences, Two Playbooks
Product Hunt and Hacker News Show HN are often discussed interchangeably, but they reward different things.
Product Hunt
Audience: 3-5M monthly, heavily indie-hacker and non-technical product people. Strong in the US, UK, India.
Wins for: Consumer products, design-forward tools, wellness, productivity, AI wrappers with clean UX, anything with a shareable viral hook.
What works: - Polished thumbnail and gallery - Clear one-liner benefit - Maker comment posted at 00:01 with a story - Upvotes from your existing audience in the first 4 hours
Doesn't work: - Complex B2B with long sales cycles - Highly technical developer tools with no UI - Regional products with small English-speaking audience
Show HN (Hacker News)
Audience: 5-8M monthly, heavily technical. Strong in the US, Western Europe, English-speaking Asia.
Wins for: Developer tools, open-source projects, infrastructure, interesting technical experiments, tools with a novel approach or architecture.
What works: - A working demo (ideally embeddable) - A technically interesting angle described in the first paragraph - A link to the source code (or at least parts of it) - Honest answers to critical technical comments
Doesn't work: - Polished marketing copy without substance - "I built this with AI" as the selling point - Consumer wellness / productivity apps with no technical novelty - Paid-only products (HN has a strong free / open-source bias)
When to Do Both
Most indie launches that perform on both platforms launch them on different days, not simultaneously. Same-day double-launch splits the attention of your announcement audience. A typical cadence: Show HN on Tuesday, Product Hunt on the following Tuesday. This gives you two distinct peaks and two sets of inbound links (HN for developer audiences, PH for product audiences).
The "just pick one" answer
If you must pick one: developer-facing → HN, everyone else → PH. Choose based on who you want to hear from first.