Observation on launching on Product Hunt

Budi SyahiddinPRO @zeon256

26 November 2025

4 min read

Beg Bounty Bots Launch Day Product Hunt

Note

TLDR; Ironic that we are the one posting to advertise but we end up becoming the ones that got advertised by a bunch of bots with the worst kinds being beg bounty hunters

# Prelude

So recently we launched Haxiom on Product Hunt and in my opinion things went well. We got quite a number of sign ups and feedback on the app. We even reached top 10 on a day where there are multiple YC backed startups as well as AI top dog Anthropic releasing Claude Opus.

# What we expected

Since this is our first time launching, we thought that once we launch the following happens

Get feedback
Get signups

Boy was I wrong. Behind the scenes there were many more things that we didn't expect. By no means these were malicious or negative but I caught us by surprise that these will happen. So for people that are about to launch for the first time don't be surprised

# What actually happened

The moment we launched, we go paraded with bots asking many different things.

# Exhibit A: Boosting services

We received SO many emails asking us if we want some help boost our launch. We cleary did not entertain those because that is against Product Hunt's TOC. Even if it's not, these sketchy services well, are sketchy to begin with. What if they scam us LMAO. While these are annoying, they quickly go to the spam box anyway.

# Exhibit B: Marketing Agencies

You'd be surprised that they not only send emails but try to connect on LinkedIn and even message us on twitter. I guess you it's one way to hustle and I am sure some of them might actually be pretty good at what their job. Similar to the previous kinds of queries, we ignored this as we were advised by a friend that ran another startup that marketing agencies might be hit or miss especially if you don't have the capital to go for the top dogs.

# Exhibit C: Product Hunt alternative

Out of the bunch, this might probably be the least annoying one because some of the platforms advertised genuinely looks good. Nothing much to say here really

# Exhibit D: Beg Bounty Hunters

This is arguably the WORST kind of emails that we received. Unlike the first 3, those are pretty easy to ignore and don't take much time away from you. However, beg bounty reports almost certainly will cause some alarm in your team because they:

Create urgency that your site is "vulnerable"
Have very convincing email
Provide "PoC"

These reports are low quality and are of no real value (to us at least) but those that vibe code may find it scary especially if they don't have the necessary pre-requisite knowledge. Not only that, they EXPECT some sort of renumeration for reports that are misleading. For example, we got a clickjacking report but we are already protected as we use CSRF tokens for our authentication. The report contained a simple PoC that clearly doesn't work but we can totally see how someone without much knowledge can be coerced into "fixing" it

# The sequel

Yeah we got signups, yeah we hit top 10, but the real MVP of launch day was my delete key.

Product Hunt isn't a just a launch platform; it's a bot feeding frenzy with your product as bait.

If you're launching soon:

expect 50+ sketchy boost offers
expect LinkedIn DMs from agencies you never asked for
expect at least 3 fake bug reports begging for bounty

Just laugh, archive everything, and remember the actual users are the 1% that don't sound like robots.

Still worth it? Of course! Just don't forget to empty your spam folder after.

Launch over and out.