Get found where your users decide: Reddit, Hacker News, G2 and Product Hunt

People do not decide what software to use on your website. They decide somewhere you do not control. A thread on Reddit where someone asks for an alternative to the tool they are tired of. A Hacker News comment from an engineer who tried three things and explains why they kept one. A filtered list on G2. A Product Hunt page from eight months ago that still ranks. By the time someone lands on your homepage, the decision is often most of the way made.

This is uncomfortable if you have spent your effort on the parts you do own: the landing page, the docs, the onboarding. Those still matter. But the vetting happens elsewhere, in public, among people who do not know or trust you yet. The good news is that these surfaces reward the same thing, being genuinely useful in a context where someone is already trying to decide. The bad news is they punish the shortcut version of that, and the punishment is durable.

How people actually vet software

Watch how a careful person chooses a tool and you see a pattern. They do not start at your site. They start with a question, usually phrased as a problem rather than a product. What are people using for X now. Is Y worth it or is there something lighter. How do small teams handle Z without paying for the enterprise thing.

They take that question to a place with other practitioners in it. For developers and technical founders, that is often Hacker News, a relevant subreddit, or a Slack or Discord they already trust. For a less technical operator, it might be a review site, a roundup post, or a recommendation from someone in their network. They are not looking for marketing. They are looking for someone like them who has already done the evaluation and will tell them the truth, including the parts you would not put on your pricing page.

The decision is comparative, not absolute

Almost nobody evaluates your product in isolation. They evaluate it against two or three alternatives and the option of doing nothing. This is why the most valuable place to appear is not a page about you. It is a thread comparing you to the thing they are currently using, or a list where you sit next to your closest competitors and the differences are laid out plainly. If you are absent from those comparisons, you are not in the consideration set, regardless of how good the product is.

It also means the work is never finished by saying your own product is good. The work is helping someone reason about the tradeoff: when your approach fits, and honestly, when it does not. People trust a recommendation that includes a limitation far more than one that does not.

Reddit and Hacker News: earn the room first

These two communities share a temperament. They are sharp, they have seen every growth tactic, and they react badly to being marketed at. They also contain exactly the people a post-launch B2B founder needs, which is why the temptation to barge in is strong and almost always backfires.

The pattern they punish

The fastest way to get ignored, or removed, is to show up only when you have something to sell. An account whose entire history is links to one product reads as exactly what it is. Moderators see it, the community sees it, and your contribution gets discounted before it is read. On Hacker News, a thinly disguised promotion gets flagged. On most subreddits, self-promotion that exceeds the unwritten ratio gets the post pulled and the account watched.

The mechanism here is not arbitrary hostility. These communities run on the assumption that the person speaking has no commercial stake in your click. When that assumption breaks, every future contribution from the same source is suspect. The cost is not one removed post. It is the standing of the account.

What actually works

Be a participant before you are a vendor. Answer questions in your area of expertise where your product is not the answer. Write the comment that genuinely helps the person asking, even when the help is how to do this without any tool at all. When your product is honestly the best fit for a specific question someone has asked, mention it plainly, disclose that it is yours, and explain the reasoning. Disclosure is not a weakness here. It is the thing that makes the recommendation usable.

On Hacker News specifically, the Show HN format exists for exactly this. It is a sanctioned place to put your work in front of the community and ask for reactions. It works when you treat it as a conversation: post the thing, explain what it does and what it does not, and then stay in the thread and answer every hard question without getting defensive. The people who do this well treat the critical comments as the point, not the threat.

There is a slower form of this that compounds harder. Useful answers in community threads get indexed, and they get read by people who arrive months later through search. A precise, honest reply to a best-tool-for-X question keeps working long after you have forgotten you wrote it. AI assistants increasingly read these threads too when they synthesise an answer about a category, which means a clear comparative comment can shape how your product gets described in places you will never see.

Review sites: G2, Capterra and the directories

Review sites operate on different physics from communities. Nobody reads G2 for fun. People arrive there with intent, usually late in a decision, often comparing two named products. This makes the traffic small but unusually qualified. It also makes these pages rank well for commercial queries and, increasingly, makes them a source that AI assistants pull from when asked which tool is better.

Why an empty profile hurts more than no profile

A category page on a review site lists every product, including yours whether you claim it or not. If your row has no reviews, a thin description and no detail while the competitor next to you has a populated profile, the page is actively making your case for you, badly. The absence is not neutral. Next to a full competitor, an empty profile reads as a product nobody uses.

The fix is unglamorous. Claim the profile. Fill in the description, categories, integrations and screenshots so the page reflects the product as it actually is. Then ask real customers, the ones who already like the product, to leave an honest review. Not a campaign of incentivised five-star reviews, which these platforms detect and which careful readers discount on sight. A handful of specific, real reviews that mention concrete use cases outperform a pile of generic praise, because the specificity is what a careful reader is scanning for.

Comparison and alternative pages

Review sites generate pages like X versus Y and alternatives to Z automatically, and those pages capture people at the exact moment they are switching. You cannot fully control them, but you can make sure the underlying data is accurate, that your profile is complete enough to render well in the comparison, and that the reviews present give a fair picture. When a person is reading alternatives to the tool they are frustrated with, you want to be a complete, credible entry on that list rather than a blank one.

Product Hunt: the launch is the smaller half

Product Hunt gets discussed as a launch-day event, a spike of traffic and a badge. The spike is real and mostly fades within days. The part that matters longer is that a Product Hunt page is a durable, well-ranked artefact that keeps appearing when people search your product name or your category, and it keeps being read by people deciding months after launch day.

Treat it as a permanent page, not a one-day event

Because the page persists, the things that age well are worth more than the things that spike. A clear, honest first comment from the founder explaining what the product is and who it is for. A tagline that describes the product rather than reaching for cleverness. Replies to the questions people asked, left intact for the next reader. Someone who finds your page in eight months will not see your upvote count climbing in real time. They will see whether you showed up as a real person and explained your work.

This reframes the launch itself. You are not optimising for a single day of attention. You are producing a credible, lasting page in a place that people and search engines both trust, and the conversation you have on launch day is the content that page carries forward. Rushing it to hit a metric on day one trades a durable asset for a temporary number.

What compounds and what evaporates

The thread running through all of these surfaces is the difference between presence that accumulates and presence that resets to zero. A spammy comment, an incentivised review, a launch optimised for a one-day spike: these either get removed or simply stop working the moment the push stops. Worse, the spammy version can leave a residue, a flagged account or a pattern of reviews that a careful reader notices and holds against you.

The compounding version is slower and feels less like marketing. A genuinely helpful answer that keeps getting found. A complete, honest review profile that does its work every time someone reaches the comparison page. A Product Hunt page that still reads well a year later. None of these spike. All of them keep paying out, and they reinforce each other, because the same honest, specific contribution tends to be the one that ranks in search, gets quoted in an AI answer, and earns the benefit of the doubt in a community.

The honesty is the strategy, not a constraint on it

It is easy to read do not be spammy as a rule you tolerate to avoid getting banned. That underrates it. On every one of these surfaces, the audience is specifically there to filter out the marketing and find the truth. Honesty, including admitting where your product is not the right fit, is the thing that gets through the filter. The founders who win these channels are not the ones with the cleverest tactics. They are the ones whose contributions a stranger would trust.

Making it manageable as a team of one

The honest problem with all of this is that it is a lot of surfaces, and a solo founder cannot watch them all. You cannot read every relevant Reddit thread the moment it appears, notice when a competitor gets a new wave of G2 reviews, or catch the Hacker News thread where someone is asking for exactly what you built. The work is real, the work compounds, and the work is too distributed to hold in your head.

This is the gap AfterLaunch is built to close. It watches the communities, directories and review sites where your category gets discussed, surfaces the threads and pages where you could honestly show up, and drafts the contribution in your voice for you to review and approve before anything is posted. The judgement and the disclosure stay yours. The watching and the drafting do not have to.

If you want to see where you already stand across these surfaces, the free Growth Snapshot scores your discoverability across seven dimensions, including the community and directory presence most founders never audit. It is a clear-eyed starting map for the slow, compounding work above.