RIP Golden Kitty Awards. Long live Orbit Awards 🚀
We’ve got a big update: after ten years, we’re officially sunsetting the Golden Kitty Awards.
They’ve been a huge part of Product Hunt’s history, but the ecosystem has changed. AI moves fast, new categories show up constantly, and a once-a-year award no longer reflects how products actually grow. Most of the real story now happens after launch day.
So we’re introducing something built for this pace: The Orbit Awards.
Orbit is a quarterly award series focused on traction. High-quality reviews, detailed community insight, founder reviews, and hands-on testing. Less about hype, more about who’s consistently climbing.
Our first edition drops December 1, starting with AI Dictation. We’re looking at the products that got us typing less and speaking more like: @Wispr Flow, @MacWhisper, @Aqua Voice, @superwhisper, and a few others that saw surprising spikes and strong review momentum.
The next few categories will include vibecoding tools, AI automation builders, AI meeting note-takers, and coding agents, so if you want your favorite tool nabbing an Orbit Award, make sure you share your love with a high-quality review 👀
We’d love input from the community:
What other categories should Orbit tackle?
What would make these awards more useful for founders?
Any signals you think we should weight more heavily?
Excited to see where this goes.
See you in Orbit. 🚀
Replies
Really interesting shift. The Golden Kitty had its charm, but Orbit feels more in sync with how products actually evolve now. Traction, updates, and real community feedback tell a much clearer story than a one-time yearly spotlight.
For new categories, I think there’s a big opportunity around design tools, agency productivity, and small-team AI helper the stuff people rely on every single day but often gets overlooked.
One thing that would make Orbit super valuable is a bit more transparency on what moved a product up or down. Even a short note on what stood out (or didn’t) would help founders understand where to improve.
Wylo
Hey @rajiv_ayyangar , Orbit Awards definitely sound like a strong move. If we’re serious about spotlighting products that actually provide value and scale, it’d be great to factor in the metrics real operators obsess over: active users vs. sign-ups, paying user growth, MoM growth, retention, etc. We might not need all of them though. Add in high-signal testimonials from real users (not fluff), and you’ll create an award that’s genuinely useful for prospects, founders, and PH itself. This is the kind of signal the ecosystem needs. Hope we get something like this! Fingers crossed.
Claap
The real question is, will the Orbit award looks as nice as the Golden Kitty award when displayed on a shelf? 😏🏆
A mini radio station would be awesome!
Product Hunt Dark Screen
Excited for the change. Less go PH🚀
Trends.vc
😉 Bullish on the quarterly pattern.
re: Dictation
Don't miss @VoiceInk https://tryvoiceink.com/ Not the founder but it's a great tool.
Unicorns Club
We’re grateful that Unicorns Club managed to win a Golden Kitty — now an award with historical value 💛🐱
Feels even more special in hindsight.
AI products are still dominating the hype cycle, and that’s great — but it also makes the truly non-AI-tagline products stand out even more.
(Though let’s be honest: today any serious product uses AI somewhere — maybe not in the user-facing features, but in code generation, moderation, support workflows, etc.)
What matters is what problem you’re actually solving.
In our case at Unicorns Club, we focus on something AI can’t fake: verified founder-submitted data about early-stage startups.
Especially now, when traditional databases like Crunchbase leaned heavily into AI-generated records — and the accuracy dropped to an all-time low — having human-validated data became 10× more valuable.
So yes — long live Orbit Awards!
And long live the products built on real problems, real users, and real data.
Scade.pro
Change is always very exciting and a little scary))
I am looking forward to December 1 and the first nominations.
Does this mean that tools that are not based on AI are penalized? 🤔