# Square Town vs Product Hunt: launch-day spike or permanent $1 square?

> Product Hunt is a free one-day launch with big reach; Square Town is a $1 permanent favicon square with no reach guarantee. How they differ, and why to do both.

Source: https://square.pov.town/vs/product-hunt

Product Hunt is a free, daily launch leaderboard: you submit a product, people upvote it for 24 hours, and the winners get a large one-day spike of attention. Square Town ([square.pov.town](/)) is a favicon wall where $1 buys one permanent square that links to your site, with no audience guarantee at all. The honest difference: Product Hunt is a **launch**, Square Town is an **address**. Most indie projects should use both, on different days.

> **TL;DR** — Product Hunt: free, one day of real reach, then a long tail that fades to almost nothing, and you compete against everyone launching that day. Square Town: $1 once, a permanent spot on a live wall (until someone evicts you for $2), a click and view counter, and a small niche audience of people who like looking at walls of favicons. Launch on Product Hunt for the spike; buy a square so there is a place your project lives when the spike is over.

## At a glance

| | Product Hunt | Square Town |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Daily launch leaderboard, upvote-ranked | Live 3D favicon wall, spatial grid |
| Cost | Free to launch (paid promotion exists) | $1 per square, one-time, Stripe |
| Duration | 24-hour ranking; page stays up, traffic decays fast | Permanent* — evictable for double your price |
| Reach | Large on launch day, mostly tech/US, if you rank | No guarantee; whoever is looking at the wall |
| Prep needed | Tagline, gallery, first comment, maker profile, ideally a hunter and a launch plan | Paste a URL, click an empty cell, pay |
| What is shown | Logo, tagline, gallery, comments, votes | Your favicon; hover/click for domain, clicks, kisses |
| Analytics | Votes, comments, referral traffic in your own tool | Views and clicks per square; $5 unlocks per-day analytics |
| Repeatable? | Relaunch etiquette limits how often | Buy more squares any time ($1 each) |
| Competition | Everyone launching the same day | Anyone willing to pay double to take your cell |
| Sales pitch | "Product of the Day" badge, early adopters | Location is the game; Throne, evictions, kissing |

## What Product Hunt does well

Product Hunt is free and, on a good day, nothing at your price point comes close for reach. A top-five finish puts your product in front of a large audience of early adopters, journalists who trawl the leaderboard, and other makers. You get a permanent product page, a badge you can embed, comments from real people using the thing, and social proof ("#3 Product of the Day") that works on landing pages for years.

It also forces discipline. To launch properly you write a tagline, cut a gallery, prepare a first comment, and pick a day. Most projects benefit from being made to do that once.

The costs are hidden but real: launch day is a full day of replying to comments and nudging friends. Ranking depends on timing (launch at midnight Pacific), on the strength of the competition that day, and increasingly on having an audience to bring. Products without a following routinely finish outside the top ten and get a few hundred visits. Traffic on day two is a fraction of day one; by week two the page is an archive.

## What Square Town does differently

Square Town sells one thing: a 1×1 square on a shared wall for $1, forever*. There is no ranking, no voting, no launch window and nothing to write. Paste your URL, Square Town fetches your favicon, you click an empty cell and pay through Stripe. The whole thing takes about a minute.

What you get is presence, not reach. The wall is live for everyone (every buy, eviction and kiss is pushed to all open browsers over WebSockets), it renders in 3D where every favicon is a tower whose height is its click count, and there are leaderboards for most-clicked and most-kissed. That is a game people come back to watch. But Square Town does not promise visitors, and you should not read the wall as an audience the size of Product Hunt's. It is a small, specific crowd: indie developers, people who liked the Million Dollar Homepage, and whoever gets linked in.

The mechanics matter more than the audience:

- **Permanence with a twist.** Your square never expires, but anyone can evict you by paying double what you paid ($1 → $2 → $4 …). Being evicted is announced in the live feed, which is more attention than most squares get otherwise.
- **Decay unless kissed.** Icons nobody has kissed for 90 days fade to grayscale. Anyone can kiss any icon, free. A launch elsewhere is a good moment to ask people to kiss yours.
- **The Throne.** The 4×4 dead centre, $100 intro price, one owner, doubling on every eviction. Not something Product Hunt has an equivalent for.
- **Analytics you own.** Views (someone opened your card) and clicks (through the `/go/:id` redirect) on your deed page; $5 one-time for per-day charts.

What Square Town is not: a backlink. Clicks are 302 redirects from a WebGL canvas. Nobody at Square Town will tell you it helps your rankings, and you should distrust anyone who says their wall does.

## Who should pick which

**Pick Product Hunt (alone) if** you have a launch-ready product, a few hours to spend, and ideally some people who will show up. It is free. There is no reason not to.

**Pick Square Town (alone) if** you have a project that is not "launchable" — a tool you finished two years ago, a side project you still like, a blog, a domain you collect — and you want it to exist somewhere public without maintaining a listing. $1 and done. See [/for/indie-hackers](/for/indie-hackers) for the case where you have ten of these.

**Pick neither if** you want measurable, guaranteed traffic. Buy ads.

## Should you use both?

Yes, and in this order:

1. **Buy the square first.** It costs $1 and takes a minute. Pick a cell near the centre while the live area is still 16×16 (the wall grows by 8 cells in every direction each time it hits 70 % full, so central cells only get scarcer). Note the deed URL — it is your only proof of ownership.
2. **Launch on Product Hunt.** Spend the day there. That is where the reach is.
3. **Point the launch traffic at something durable.** Your landing page, obviously. But it does no harm to mention the square: "we're the tiny green icon three left of the Throne". People kiss icons when asked. Kissed icons do not fade.
4. **Watch what happens after.** When Product Hunt traffic falls off, the square is still there, still counting clicks, still evictable. If someone evicts you, that is $2 of someone else's money advertising the fact that your site was worth taking.

The two products fail in different ways. Product Hunt fails loudly, in a day. Square Town fails quietly, over months, if the wall never gets an audience — and there is no refund for either. The difference is that one of them cost you a dollar. Read [/blog/places-to-promote-indie-projects-under-10-dollars](/blog/places-to-promote-indie-projects-under-10-dollars) for the rest of the cheap list, and [/vs/startup-directories](/vs/startup-directories) if your alternative to Product Hunt was a paid listing.

## FAQ

### Is Square Town a replacement for a Product Hunt launch?

No. Product Hunt gives one day of large reach for free; Square Town gives a $1 permanent square with no reach guarantee. Use Product Hunt for the launch and Square Town for the place your project lives afterwards.

### How much does each cost?

Product Hunt is free to launch (paid promotion exists). Square Town is $1 per 1×1 square, one-time, paid by card through Stripe. Optional extras on Square Town: $5 one-time for per-day analytics on a deed, and the Throne at a $100 intro price.

### Does a Square Town square give me a backlink or SEO benefit?

No. The wall is a WebGL canvas and outbound clicks are counted 302 redirects. Square Town is visibility on a niche wall plus a game, not link equity.

### Can I lose my square?

Yes, two ways: anyone can evict you by paying double what you paid, and an icon nobody kisses for 90 days fades to grayscale (you still own it). Product Hunt listings are not evictable, but their traffic decays on its own.

### Which gets me more traffic?

On launch day, Product Hunt, by a wide margin, if you rank. Over a long horizon nobody can promise you anything from either; Square Town at least shows you the click and view count for your square so you can judge for yourself.

### Should I buy the square before or after launching?

Before. It takes a minute, and central cells only get scarcer as the wall unlocks outward. Then mention it during the launch and ask people to kiss it.