My Launch on Product Hunt: The Good, the Bad and the Bots
At this point I have completely given up launching on PH, but I'm still posting each new product there for the backlink. I barely open it and even protest voting unless it's a product from a person I know and want to support.
I didn't prepare and just posted Text2Note. I posted intentionally on Saturday thinking it would increase the chance to get featured, but still that chance was small considering the other 160 products posted that day.
People are building like crazy! Although a large portion of those are just landing pages with waitlists.
Product Hunt subjectively selects just a dozen to be featured each day. In this case it was just 8 products. It's a miracle how Text2Note got selected.
As for the other products, good bye! No one will see them and they don't even have a chance to compete.
If PH features you, it actually matters. A lot of real people notice your product. PH competitors are far behind, bringing single-digit visitors.
Results & Traffic
Text2Note ended up in position #4 with 240+ upvotes.
The website got 400+ unique visitors: 36% from US, 12% India, 3% UK.
It got only 10 signups, but it's okay considering people have to enter their CC details for the free trial.
The post on PH brought other backlinks from directories, blogs, and newsletters featuring Text2Note.
I haven't prepared an audience or even a group of friends ready to vote. I haven't asked anyone for an upvote. I haven't mentioned voting anywhere. It's in the PH rules after all. All the votes are from people I don't know.
Posting from my personal accounts on X, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Hacker News didn't affect the voting much. Resulted in 6 view-to-vote conversions.
Observations & Red Flags
As standard, I got all the spam messages from people offering organic upvotes for a very cheap price. In the portfolios of their past clients, I could see top 3 products launched on PH. Who knows if this is true or they just added them because they are top 3.
I didn't have a better thing to do that day, so I had the launch dashboard open and closely followed all the upvotes. Some votes from well-known people who are very active on PH were added and then disappeared after some time. Maybe they're bots, maybe they got paid to boost another product instead. I could confirm this by seeing their vote and comment on other launches that day.
Bot comments. A lot. Maybe even all of them. I replied with a robot emoji emoji to each that I thought was written by AI, but even for the ones I genuinely replied to, I am not 100% convinced they are real.