Show HN: A fair Product Hunt alternative
simplelister.comOver 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!
> 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.
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?
I understand your concern, but our paid tier simply boosts visibility, not rankings. It’s not “pay to win.” The underdog feature gives lesser-known projects a fair shot, chosen randomly from those with fewer upvotes. This ensures that every product, regardless of budget, has a chance to shine without favoritism. also, we have a plan to change all voting system for the future too.
Products with higher visibility will automatically get more upvotes, so even if you don't directly pay for upvotes, you indirectly do pay for upvotes.
If you let people pay to be featured, you'll always end up favouring those who pay. And if you didn't favour those who pay, why would people pay in the first place?
This is the big problem with all recommendation sites: The easiest way to monetize them is by charging vendors for visibility; so sooner or later all recommendation sites start recommending the most profitable products. High quality fair priced products don't have a chance, since they will always be outbid by someone who makes a cheaper product or charges more.
I don't disagree with the point that visibility = upvotes = leaderboards. It's possible it biases rankings as you outlined. That said, given the problem: "How do I monetize my rankings/listings website without introducing pay to win or relying on third-party ads?"
I think the author implemented a tasteful and respectful solution. Other sites inject sponsors atop search results, every nth result, block parts of pages, force extra navs to link-spammed pages to get the product site, or sends sponsors to the top of rankings regardless of votes. You never have to glance at that portion if you're not interested, and can find it if you are. It's good design and advertises to the user in a respectful and convenient way imo. This is a small fixture that's static, and not even in the common paths followed by users ("F" eye track)
@Author: Perhaps a voting freeze during the sponsored period or a vote expiration (votes older than a certain amount of time fall off the total or such) would address the visibility = rank boost concern. Two random examples for moderating it with zero future thought there, but I think you get the idea.
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. I agree that visibility can affect upvotes and rankings. Given the challenge of monetizing without pay-to-win or intrusive ads. Your suggestions—like a voting freeze during sponsorships or vote expiration—are good, interesting ways to further address this concern.
There is no way to square this circle. If you take payments from the vendors you recommend, you will never be fair. Either you take their payments and don't promote them, then they'll stop paying. Or you take their payments and promote them, then you'll end up doing paid promotion.
If you want to make a "fair" recommendation site, you need to find some other way to monetize. One possibility would be to charge potential customers. I believe there are people out there who want fair recommendations, I'm just have no idea how to get them to pay.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
How long ago was this? Have you read this [1]?
[1] https://wakatime.com/blog/67-bots-so-many-bots
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.
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
you're correct it doesn't work ; some of axios.com stories are linked that way as well, it's irritating
When you click ‘Community’ it goes to X. That’s not at all what I was hoping for or expected after clicking that link. Especially since you have another link directly below that to ‘Follow on X.’
I’d strongly recommend having your own community for something like this rather than relying on another platform.
If you intend to replace PH someday that is going to be a prerequisite. It’s going to take time to build, so I’d start asap rather than sending people to X.
Hey, thank you for your feedback! Building a community is indeed very difficult and takes a long time. In the long run, what you’re suggesting makes a lot of sense, and we need to start right away. For now, we’ll have to stick with X community, but we’ll launch our own community very soon.
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 :)
hahahahah
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
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.
Please use regular hyperlinks so I can open in a new tab. (The visit button should probably open a new tab by default so users aren't taken away from your site.)
Got it! Thankss
If you care for an opposing opinion, i find this obnoxious. I can easily middle click/modifier+click your links to open in a new tab if i want to and this is way les annoying than going back to previous tab to close it.
did you even try? This is not the case
I think the parent commenter is referring to a general dislike for target="_blank" (i.e. new tab) links. Probably because there's a way to force a link to open in a new tab, but not a consistent way to force it to open in the same tab.
Nice, but the thing that holds a sensible person back from joining is point 10 in the ToS “10. Changes to the Terms
- We reserve the right to modify these Terms at any time. Any changes will be effective immediately upon posting the revised Terms. Your continued use of Simple Lister following any changes constitutes acceptance of the new Terms.”
That's very standard in ToS, and I would think a no-brainer. How could one use a site without accepting its terms of service? Notably Hacker News has almost that exact same language with a 14-day notice period. YouTube, Twitter, Wordpress.com, etc. all have similar language. What is your problem with it?
I mean, they have the right to be opposed to this practice even though it is standard, right?
I myself am opposed to it too, and I believe the more people stand up to it, the merrier.
Thanks for feedback, I will think about it
I've got a product, but I'm not sure if it's a good fit for Simple Lister. Can you provide any guidance or support to help me determine whether my product is a good fit for the platform, and if so, how I can optimize my submission to get the most out of it?
We don't have any guidance yet, actually I'm preparing new free tool about that. Sorry for today
Looking forward to it! All the best :)
This is great! IMO there's always room for more platforms to expose visibility for product launches.
Do you mind sharing a bit about the amount of daily traffic you get? Or plans for growing the platform? It would help people understand if/when it's worth paying to get listed. Thanks!
every one of these products starts out as a fair platform... just give it time and success
Great idea! I'll save it for next time. Wishing you the best!
It looks nice. Please consider respecting the 'open in a new tab' feature for the product links. I tried using the middle mouse button, but it brought up the scroll control instead.
Thankss! I will fix it tomorrow.
Very interesting! I'd love to see discussion about how game theory/mechanism design could help with "marketplaces" like this!
Looks great! I have submitted my startup https://chattysun.com
Good luck with your launch!
This is a good idea - I’m going to bookmark it for the next time I launch something and I wish you the best. Good job reaching launch.
Thank you for your kind wishes, see you at the launch!
Cool app.
I've submitted my app Overlayed, let's see how it goes!
I thought that was the lulu lemon logo at first glance.
hahah yes, also it looks like PI number's sign
Submitted Glama. Excited to participate.
Thanks! Good luck for your launch :)
Is the UI done with some AI tool?
[flagged]
I did not personally find this to be a detractor.
FWIW, I didn't find this to be a bottleneck and it probably helps detect upvote rings.
easy way to reduce bots though
what would you recommend to sign up
The way Hacker News does it.
The dev has to create a fair bit of additional infra if they provide username/password auth
* bot prevention
* same user creating multiple accounts (so now you need some IP tracking or reputation system maybe)
Which is why I think sign in with Google is okay to start with for indie devs.
It's understandable if you as a user don't like it though but shouldn't be a criteria to dismiss Show HN imo
> The dev has to create a fair bit of additional infra if they provide username/password auth
Not until the service gets popular. And having sign in with google as the only option may work against that outcome.
Because of we did not use that way, users can sign up multiple times and can vote their products. But I'm thinking about different limitations in inside. Thank you for feedback!
fwiw, hn definitely deals with that issue too