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- 🍐#127: Deep dive into marketing on Product Hunt, and how to improve AI search visibility
🍐#127: Deep dive into marketing on Product Hunt, and how to improve AI search visibility
Why do pears have different shape than apples?
Jakub Czakon
September 14, 2025
Hey,
We are starting to get into the “why? but why? but why?” phase with my kiddo. Which inspired me to ask “Why do pears 🍐 have different shape than apples?”.
The best explanation I found is that the growth is stronger around the seeds and those are positioned lower in pears. Not satisfied. Why lower then? Thoughts?
This week on the agenda:
Marketing dev tools on Product Hunt with Flo Merian
AI search discoverability for APIs and SDKs (playbook + a tool)
+ a few bonus links at the end
Total pearusing time: 5min
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Developer marketing insights
1. Marketing dev tools on Product Hunt with Flo Merian
This time I had a pleasure of speaking to Flo Merian one of the co-founders of our marketingto.dev community about marketing dev tools on Product Hunt. Flo had some really strong points for why and how to do it (yes disarming some of my biases when it comes to PH). A good one for sure.
Some things we talked about:
One launch << continuous re-launching: While it is true that most successful launches don’t bring direct results, you can get significant interest over time as you re-launch every time it makes sense. You basically treat the channel like “another channel” NOT like a place to go launch and get initial signups.
Don’t over-invest: If you do treat is another channel and you re-use your launch assets across your channels the incremental investment in launching will not be too high. This is where my thinking failed as I’ve always treated PH differently and because of that the ROI on preparing assets and gathering community to upvote didn’t make sense. That is why launch weeks love PH.
Youu have to go visual: invest in the visual assets, great images showing features. Video doesn’t hurt but is not a must.
Use discussions (forums): it’s Reddit-like but nicer and you can plug yourself in to gather feedback, tease launches, ask, and occasionally, where it makes sense share your product.
Way more stuff + examples with commentary in the podcast.
Listen/watch to this or previous episode on:
2. AI search discoverability for APIs and SDKs (playbook + a tool)
One of my favorite dev tool GTM voices Ben Williams cooked up something really cool recently.
In this article he goes through the process of improving AI engines visibility for your APIs and SDKs. This is the table of contents:
Why AI recommendations are now as critical as SEO
How to build a prompt suite that mirrors real user intent
Running your benchmark: platforms, process, and tracking
Special focus: developer tools & SDKs (where the rules are different)
Analysing results and closing the gap
The iterative improvement loop
Next steps and resources
On top of that he shares:
a spreadsheet (in the article),
a list of things to consider improving (in the article),
and a tool he has built to operationalize these insights (DevTune).
This article is gold (and not only because the DevTune rhymes with Neptune ;)).
A few things I noted while reading:
Third-party content matters: engines build answers on a mix of Reddit, GitHub awesome repos, forums, various blogs, your website, and your docs. Social listening that ends up feeding those third-party websites will show up in AI search eventually.
Ask(prompt) like your audience: users ask for long-tail, long questions (average prompt I think is 15 words for AI search vs 3 for SEO), use real words your dev community uses. “Best logging library for Node.js”. Developers go deeper with their specificity vs other personas so expect a long-long tail.
Create a list of prompts: mostly solution aware and problem aware questions: “What is best X for Y”, “How do I X my Y?”, “X vs Y for Z”. Ask for lists, use different product categories (devs call the same things differently), include use cases an integrations. And track the results over time (Ben shares a spreadsheet in the article).
Assure zero temperature in analysis: a lot of dev search for API/SDKs happens through Cursor and similar within IDE. You want to replicate this environment in your analysis.
Two more great articles from Ben exploring these problems and solutions:
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2. Bonus links to check out
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