Course Creators Being Locked Out Of Product Hunt Makes Zero Sense

This article is part of a series on building the next generation educational platform Mass Street University. Some articles are also posted on Indie Hackers.

About a year ago, my marketing partner Traction Mate urged me to put MSU on Product Hunt. I was skeptical. I was pounding out a lot of content and I had gotten rumblings that Product Hunt wasn’t as relevant as it used to be. I didn’t want to stop my flow to go learn this new thing. But he was the marketing expert, so I acquiesced.

A day later, I discovered that my listing on PH had been removed. No notification, no explanation, nothing. Just a big fat, “you’re not welcome here” in the form of a listing not found message. That hacked me off.

I was hacked off because Woz U is on PH. Woz U sells courses. I sell courses. What? Does my last name gotta be Wozniak to get any respect around here? My attitude at the time was, “ain’t nobody got time for this,” and I just moved on.

However, recently, I discovered that MSU has achieved all Phase I goals. Blowing past goals without me realizing it is a bad habit and a whole other story. Anyway, that meant I had some bandwidth freed up and I decided to knock off one of my dusty moldy year-old low priority todos: figuring out why I got deleted from PH.

First off, I didn’t understand PH. I thought it was a directory of cool stuff. It’s actually more about what is hot right now. It’s like making it to the top of Hacker News. Great for the day but 24 hours later and you are literally yesterday’s news.

Once I understood that I was way less enthused about PH but Woz U still stuck in my craw, so I kept looking at policies. Right there in their FAQs. No courses. Bulls**t.

What is Woz U? It’s courses! I was able to put together that it’s allowed because it’s an education “platform” read: cool mobile app. Well guess what? MSU is an education platform too.

I may still take a look at listing on PH, but I wanted to spend a few moments ranting about the whole “no courses” thing.

Product. Hunt. Product. It’s like right there in the name. Is a course not a product? What are we? Chopped liver? I mean especially for those of us that are tech instructors and have to create some cool stuff to make our courses work. I think we have every right to list on PH as the guy creating the next Not Hot Dog app.

I don’t know how we get this turned around. Maybe start a petition on Change.org? I’m probably not going to do anything at all. I was just curious if anybody even cares about PH and if the “no courses” policy rankled you too.