Bolt Perspective | A Stage Beyond Product Hunt

These days, many app developers turn to Product Hunt to promote their products. But beyond Product Hunt, there are plenty of other channels worth exploring. I regularly browse Hacker News, where the Show HN section serves as a platform for builders to showcase what they've made. Many products that later gained wide recognition first appeared there. One not-so-distant example is ollama (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36802582), and a more recent one is Luma, the video generation tool that blew up last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40715812).

I scrape Show HN content every week — partly out of curiosity about what interesting things people are building and where trends are heading, and partly because some entries are so delightfully absurd they single-handedly make my day. Today, I've picked a few highlights from last week's 74 submissions to give you a taste:

Content Generation

Besides Luma, there were roughly ten other multimodal content generation products last week: In Video AI for long-form video (https://invideoai.video), Clip Remix for turning videos into Twitter posts (https://clipremix.com/), Video Snack for converting videos into articles (https://videosnack.net/). It was almost overwhelming. The most intriguing might be Heymusic (https://heymusic.ai/) — not only does it generate decent music, but it created a dedicated landing page for Show HN that composes a song about your code. Beneath the apparent flattery lies a full-throated roast. That kind of marketing deserves a manual upvote.

Code Generation and Data Analysis

Another hot category. People are building everything from website generators to SQL generators to test generators. Among the more interesting ones: saas-quick (https://saas-quick.com/), which generates complete web apps (though as HN commenters noted, the site itself is painfully ugly), and a slick AI-first SQL Editor (https://sqlpilot.ai/).

Marketing

There's Roundtable.ai from Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, which handles quality control for surveys. Another intriguing product is ThreadQuilt (https://www.threadquilt.com/), which appears to be a vertical search and summarization tool purpose-built for Reddit content. OpenAI previously struck a content licensing deal with Reddit. I've always found Reddit's community discussions distinctive — broad in scope, high in quality, and constantly refreshed. Search and summarization of these discussions could prove valuable for everything from user research to competitive analysis.

Entertainment and Delight

I felt this category deserved its own section — some products are genuinely hilarious. Take this platform whose sole purpose is to cheer you on (https://www.cheerleaderai.com).

But the real time-sink this week was YouSim (https://yousim.ai/), an open-ended text-only game I found myself playing for a while. It's like an open-world MUD, except all character personalities and interactions are entirely AI-generated — surprisingly polished, with plenty of room for imagination.

Space constraints prevent me from covering all 74 submissions here. Interested readers can message "HN240624" on our WeChat account to get the full list.

Overall, compared to Product Hunt, Show HN skews noticeably more developer-oriented. The interfaces are often too barebones for visual design enthusiasts, and the links frequently lead straight to GitHub repos rather than polished landing pages. Completion levels also vary wildly — from fully fledged products to simple prototypes. And Show HN actively discourages upvotes and comments from friends 😉

If Product Hunt is a go-to-market weapon, Show HN is more like an early-stage stage for gathering feedback and generating buzz. If it fits you and your product, it's well worth a shot. I hope to see your product Show up there someday. (My WeChat: Can_Zheng)

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