Show HN: Product Hunt Launch Dashboard | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Product Hunt Launch Dashboard

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45 pointsdanielxli17 comments

ProductHunt is very gamified. You have to jump through their hoops to do well, reach out to "hunters" (these guys will put this badge on their twitter/linkedin) to post for you to get the boost from their following, schedule to launch at the perfect time, spam people to upvote you. People buy bots, PH doesn't care like HN does about voting rings or authenticity.

We launched D2 to 629 upvotes on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704254), and 1.3k on Reddit. I didn't want to fuck with all that ProductHunt checklist stuff and threw it on there and got 9 (https://www.producthunt.com/products/d2).

In hindsight it was probably worth playing their game. It does get a lot of traffic. I just never visit the page because I know how gamified it is.

Interesting stats on HN vs. Reddit vs. PH!

I’m curious if there are any “success stories” out there -- anyone who played the game and felt it made a material difference to their success?

Yeah! would love to hear if there are any of these

oh i actually did play it a few years back when I launched Terrastruct (company behind D2). It was just a solo-effort bare bones project at the time, but I reached out to a hunter and all that. Got 112 upvotes (https://www.producthunt.com/products/terrastruct), and got a few paid subscriptions from it.

It was a material morale boost at a time when I didn't know if anyone would find it worth paying for. We've since grown a lot. In total it was only like $20/mo, but felt like a big success to me at the time.

I guess I A/B tested playing the game vs not playing the game, as much as one can.

I think comparing up votes is not very useful to determine with community had the most impact on your business, but one metric that is common to HN, PH and Reddit is traffic.

How much traffic did each of those communities drive to your site when you launched?

We launched our product on Product Hunt today and thought it would be fun to share all of the metrics we're tracking associated with our launch.

We followed several of the Product Hunt launch checklists including...

* https://heyday.xyz/blog/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt/

* https://www.producthunt.com/launch

Learnings so far

* It's REALLY important to stack a bunch of upvotes right at midnight PST. We fell behind in the first hour, and it's quite tough to get back in the top 10 afterwards. Make more friends in Europe and Asia!

* Launching on PH is fun, but not a lot of discovery seems to actually happen on the site. It seems like the winners from the initial batch of upvotes at ~2am PT generally stay the winners throughout the day

* Some of the "how to launch" articles suggest that only getting "seasoned" accounts to upvote and comment is important. On the contrary, seems like a lot of the top 3 traffic is driven by fairly low quality interactions (not many comments and low quality comments)

> It's REALLY important to stack a bunch of upvotes right at midnight PST

Do you mean imply fake votes? Paid votes? Powerful friends?

It was alleged in the past that producthunt was gamed to such an extent that it wasn't worth using, and your commentary reminds me of that.

I was thinking legitimate votes (get 100 of your friends to stay up until midnight or get 100 friends in Asia to upvote at launch time).

But certainly seems like there are a lot of people to help round up illegitimate votes as well. We had maybe ~5 people message us telling us we didn't get enough organic votes and they could guarantee us more votes to get us to spot #1-5

If you search Google for paid votes on Product Hunt, there are a ton of companies that offer what you're looking for.

I truly loath product hunt in its current state.

It's just a game of who can get the most friends/bots to vote.

Further, it is only relevant to those present in the echo chamber.

Wholeheartedly agree. It's the most awful bay area echo chamber nonsense.

Sorry for the negativity!

It's a shame since it's such a great concept though. Lots of companies need a place to launch!

I think an event like 'products expo' behaves more authentic. Walk around, talk to people. This sucks when it comes to online.

that's a great way to show off your use case with Plus Docs! This actually makes me want to check out and sign up for Plus more than the other show HN link.

Thank you! The best way to understand it is really just to see it in action :)

I rather want some kind of marketplace that's more like solutions <-> problems matching, not maker "community". For example, identifying business problems is hard, the platform should solve "Could these companies' problems be solved by my solutions" problem. Name it realbusinessproblems.com

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