Introducing Ask Product Hunt 🤔

TL;DR: We just launched Ask Product Hunt, a community-powered product search engine.

Five months ago, we joined AngelList. The news was covered far and wide, and thankfully the Product Hunt community welcomed the announcement with excitement and a big question: “What’s next?”

In many ways, things haven’t changed. Our mission at Product Hunt is to surface great products to the world and help makers find an audience.

Today, we’re introducing the biggest release since the acquisition, called Ask Product Hunt, a new community-powered product search engine.

Built for existing behavior

As with many things we build, the idea was inspired by the community.

Every day people ask Twitter for product recommendations, often cc’ing @ProductHunt. They ask:

Of course there are many places to find recommendations. Some people (like the above) ask their followers, but without a large following, many are left with silence or mediocre results.

Q&A platforms like Quora are rich wells of knowledge and stories, but they aren’t designed for product discovery.

Google and traditional search engines have an answer for everything, but results are often too broad, gamed by SEO tricksters, or outdated in a world where products launch and change rapidly.

How Ask Product Hunt works

Next time you’re on the hunt for a new product, Ask Product Hunt. Simply submit your question and we’ll send a bat signal to the people that follow you and the broader community, soliciting recommendations. As they come in, we’ll keep you updated with their product recommendations and opinions.

Of course, you can also help fellow community members by recommending products you love. You can recommend anything on Amazon, Etsy, the App Store, and the web. You’re not limited to just the things previously posted on Product Hunt.

For the past month we’ve been quietly beta tested this with a small group of helpful people in the Product Hunt community (thanks everyone for the feedback and for keeping this a secret! 🙊). As a result, we’ve discovered many great products from questions like:

Beyond what’s new today

To date, Product Hunt has focused on what’s new today, creating a place to discover things you didn’t know existed (because they didn’t yesterday). Ask Product Hunt extends the platform to help people find the best products they’re searching for.

Check out Ask Product Hunt and let us know what you think on Twitter or via email. As with everything we do, we rely on your input to make Product Hunt better. 🙏🏼

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