Thirteenth on Product Hunt, and Then the Scammers Found Me

On September 21, Postsider finished thirteenth of the day on Product Hunt. Ninety upvotes, eighteen comments, and a spot on the leaderboard I had quietly assumed it would sink past.

The entire campaign, for the record: one draft, a few slides, and the launch copy. No video, no crew rallying at midnight, no whitelist of promised upvoters. Thirteenth place showed up anyway, which is either a lesson about Product Hunt or a lesson about luck. Probably both.

By Wednesday, the result had delivered its second gift: an inbox carrying more than sixty offers to “fix” it. Bot farms, self-described Product Hunt specialists, growth gurus, and a matching wave on LinkedIn.

Almost every one of them was a scam, and almost every one was indistinguishable from all the others. This is the plain version of what that pile looks like, because the polite version, the one that files it under “outreach” and moves on, is what lets it keep growing.

‘We saw your launch. We have a bot farm.’

One example carries the whole genre, because the genre barely varies. It opens with a compliment that would fit any product, mentions they saw the launch, and lands on an offer. Most often, the offer is a bot farm: they saw my launch, they have a bot farm, they will make me number one.

Walk that trade forward one step and it collapses on its own. I send money to a stranger I cannot verify, he sends fake upvotes, and the platform that runs the leaderboard recognizes the same pattern it sees every single day and strips it. Best case, I paid for nothing. The honest version of the pitch is: give us money and we will do nothing for you, at scale.

The scam wave is Indian, and softening that sentence helps nobody

Name by name, number by number, the offers ran through the same origin. India. Not every email, but the overwhelming majority: the same phrasing, the same openings, the same few cities, the same template with my product name dropped into the second line.

I am not going to dress that sentence up, for the same reason I would never dress up any other scam’s return address. And yes, it lands on people who sent me nothing: an honest freelancer somewhere in India whose real cold email now gets deleted on sight, because it arrives wearing the same suit as sixty scams. The people hurt most by saying it out loud are the ones the pile already hurt. Pretending the wave comes from nowhere does not stop it. It only makes it harder to warn anyone.

What makes the pile funny instead of frightening is the pitch itself. These are offers to be made a millionaire, written by people whose only visible business is the email. No product to open, no name worth looking up, no result that survives one click, starting with the sender’s own. The letter is a promise of scale with nothing scaled inside it.

You can see the AI in the first line now

The tells are not subtle anymore. An opening compliment that fits anything, a bulleted “what we do,” a calendar link, urgency, the same sign-off. Four lines in, you stop suspecting the text was generated and start knowing it. Nobody read the landing page. Nobody read the product. The email was addressed to the name of the launch, generated in bulk, and shipped before breakfast in its sender’s timezone.

LinkedIn runs the same script with better typography. The requests arrived in batches, nearly all from India, profiles titled “AI Growth Strategist” or “Helping founders 10x,” no shared work, no context, nothing on the profile that survives scrutiny. I do not know you. Nothing you have shown me fixes that. Declining does not slow the next batch down.

I get it. Everyone wants to earn.

I am not against people wanting my money. So do I. I sell software, I write posts like this, and when my email lands in a stranger’s inbox it is because I bet something I built is worth ten minutes of their attention. That is the normal economy of strangers, and I am not above it.

What is missing from the pile is the craft. Cold outreach is not hard to do well: read the thing you are pitching about, write one sentence that proves you read it, show one piece of proof that you exist, and ask for something small enough to say yes to on a Tuesday. Ten minutes of work. Every recipient knows what that looks like, which is why every recipient can tell from the first line that it is not what arrived.

That is the actual damage. The two or three senders in that pile who might have been real were invisible next to sixty scams in the same uniform, and they got deleted with the rest. The scam wave is not just wasting my attention. It is burning the ground its honest neighbors need.

What I did with all of it

Deleted. Every one, without a reply. No calls, no quick chats, no trials of anything. If you are one of the sixty: I did not answer because there was nothing in your email to answer, not because ambition offends me. Come back with a name I can look up and a sentence I could not have guessed, and I will actually talk.

Thirteenth place, bought by nobody. That is the only version of that number I would ever be able to say out loud, and the sixty emails were its tax.

If you want the launch story itself, the Postsider blog has the longer version. The build story lives in the case study, and the last note here covers the three weeks before the launch. If you are about to pitch me something: I hope it is good. It will stand out more than you think.