Don’t Post on Product Hunt

Feb 24, 2026

On February 23rd, 2026, I posted about Ziva’s launch on Product Hunt. Not because I believed it would bring us more users, but because I thought it could help with SEO and AI recommendations when people search for “AI plugins for Godot” - which is our niche.

What a mistake.

The Spam Flood

Our contact address - which previously received the occasional email from a curious user or an interesting business offer - is now getting spammed every hour of the day. Within 30 hours of posting, we had 32 unread emails, almost all of them unsolicited pitches from people trying to sell us generic services we never asked for.

Why doesn’t Product Hunt hide the launcher’s email behind a captcha, or at least require some verification like YouTube does? As it stands, your contact address gets scraped and blasted by every “growth hacker” with a mailing list.

Sample Offender

Take this email for example: “where ziva.sh users lurk” from bhavya@snoogrow.com.

At first I was disgusted to see them pitch /r/godot as an advertising opportunity. The /r/godot subreddit explicitly bans AI content in their rules - which is why we have never attempted to market there.

But when I checked out their website, it was somehow worse. They’re literally selling an AI bot to shill products on Reddit. That’s the service. Automated astroturfing. And they’re pitching it to every single person who launches on Product Hunt.

Spray and Pray

I get that it’s hard to start a business. You have to find leads any way you can. But the problem with Product Hunt is that dozens of these people will “spray and pray” on your email without any targeting effort whatsoever. They don’t know what your product does. They don’t know your market. They don’t care. They just scraped your email from the launch page and fired off a template.

The supposed SEO benefit of a Product Hunt listing is not worth trashing your contact inbox. Don’t post there.

End

Since I started writing this article, I got 2 more emails. Yay.