How our 24 hour mini project got to #1 on Product Hunt | Hacker News Reader

How our 24 hour mini project got to #1 on Product Hunt

blog.elev.io

14 pointsduellsy9 comments

Off-Topic of the post, but reading this post was hard for me as I like to highlight text as I'm reading. This site will automatically put a little button underneath where my mouse was after highlight and thus whenever I tried to click off my highlight, it would automatically bring up this window to post whatever I'm highlighting. I know quite a few other people on HN have the same habit of highlighting text as we read, so surely I'm not the only one that found that quite annoying.

How do you even get listed on Product Hunt if you a) aren't an invited member and b) you don't get lucky like these guys did and have someone "stumble" across your page and submit it? The latter has essentially no chance of happening for most people, and the former is slightly more likely but still out of reach for most people. From what I can tell the site doesn't even offer a way to contact people that have submitted products like yours that might be interested in submitting on your behalf.

It's reasonably easy to approach people on the site and ask for an invite. Also, we posted the site to our social media accounts, and were fortunate that one of them posted us on Product Hunt, it wasn't planned that way, we were going to list ourselves later in the week when we had more content

I wasn't criticizing you for getting lucky and someone else posting it for you, and kudos for what you were able to accomplish. I was just saying that PH appears to be a tough nut to crack for anyone not well connected/known in SV. It's not truly a list of the best products; it's a list of the best products that well-connected SV people have created or like.

ProductHunt specifics aside, this general approach is one part of what separates successful products from ones nobody ever hears about. It's easy to write it off as "get lucky", and the founder replied elsewhere that this wasn't planned. But they have another existing product they're trying to build an audience for so suspect they've invested a fair amount of time building up their Twitter following, trying to get in front of specific people, working out ways to get press/blog/social coverage.

So I doubt it's pure coincidence that one of their Twitter followers was also a ProductHunt member.

How tricky is it to get a ProductHunt invite now? Does every user only get a few invites or are invites replenished frequently?

I've heard that you can get invited by participating in the community for a while but I don't really like the idea of having to put effort in each day in the vague hope I'll be invited, when it's quite possible I'll be helping a community I'll never be invited into.

I was fortunate enough to have a friend invite me ~2 months ago. I've not received any invites in that time though. Apparently they're distributed based on engagement with ProductHunt itself. I might check it every other day, hunt a few things I find (mostly local startups), but very rarely comment on anything. So I suspect I don't fit their model of "active user" and so I don't get invites.

You can ask people on the site, just send them a tweet and ask nicely if you can have an invite and let them know whey you need / want one, you should eventually get one without too much trouble

That seems incredibly forward - I honestly don't think I could bring myself to do it. Definitely sounds like the best approach though.

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