When looking for new products, services or even startups on the interwebs, Product Hunt has definitely become the go-to place. The product aggregation platform may help you discover recently added or popular products, but you had to struggle to search for specific needs until today. It is now making the discovery of apps a little simpler.
The company has today announced the launch of its community-powered Q&A product search platform called Ask Product Hunt. It holds a close resemblance to Quora or Jelly (now acquired by Pinterest) and enables users to pitch their queries to receive product or app recommendations from other users on the platform. This means you can now tap the community to gain access to services you’d have else missed in the database of 90,000+ products on the platform.
Product Hunt, acquired by AngelList, has been testing this nifty new feature in beta for about four weeks. This is the company’s first major feature release since its acquisition last year and much like every other product — it’s based around the community. This would help further both user interaction and product discovery.
Our mission at Product Hunt is to surface great products to the world and help makers find an audience.
This new feature has officially been launched to the entire community today and is damn simple to navigate. As seen above, you have the massive “ask for recommendations” button that enables the user to submit their queries on the platform. You can ask questions like — ‘What’s the best time management app?’ or ‘What tool would you recommend is good for prototyping mobile apps online?’
Now, the community of users on Product Hunt can see these questions right here. Your followers will also be intimated about your query so that they can pitch in and help you find the perfect solution for your need. A community member can help out any user by simply tapping the ‘add recommendation’ button and adding the answer.
Of course, the answer will have to be a product — available either on Product Hunt or on an external platform. You can just add links from Amazon, Etsy, the App Store, and the rest of the web to suggest products and the platform will take care of the rest. Once your answer is added to the question, other users can either vote up or suggest the same tool as you by hitting ‘recommend this too’ button. You can also hit the ‘helpful’ button if you think the product recommendation is helpful — that’s a lot of ways to react to one answer.
You can also hit the ‘helpful’ button if you think the product recommendation is helpful — that’s a lot of ways to react to one answer. It is only missing comments as of now, but they’re currently in the works and will be added soon enough. Further, the interface for Ask Product Hunt is simple and includes four major categories — recent, hot, needs help, following. So, you can choose one and go ahead to type out a recommendation to simply the discovery process on the platform.
