Timur BrachkowThis year I decided to launch my app on Product Hunt. I had already participated in two successful, badge-bearing launches on the platform many years ago.
I thought I knew what to expect and what not to expect, but still considered this a worthy endeavour requiring good preparation.
My expectations turned out to be very far from reality, my launch failed miserably, and I don’t think I’m the one to blame.
Why my expectations were high
My starting point was quite good:
- I have a good app tested on 100+ real users, who make up a very loyal audience informed about the launch
- I put a lot of effort into promo slides with handmade design and text
- A bunch of fellow makers who used the app in beta were committed to supporting my launch
- I have an active audience of 700+ on my social media, following the app’s development since the early days
I thought my problems would be the opinionated style of my app, an overcrowded market, and VC-backed competitors with expensive marketing.
My estimate was that, considering the existing app audience, my reach and network, I would easily get 100+ points, and maybe get into the top 5 of the day as a stretch goal.
I expected to get a lot of views and a few signups, resulting in a small number of active users, as a quirky personal B2C app isn’t a good fit for the indie-hacker-populated Product Hunt.
So here’s what I got in reality…
Here come ruthless and ineffective anti-bot measures
When the randomization period was lifted I had… 15 upvotes. This is crazy, because it is even fewer than the number of people who followed up with me about their participation in the launch. This miserable number was not enough to be featured on the front page, meaning that my launch was basically pronounced dead right after the start.
Then I saw something strange: my freshly listed app had more than twice as many followers as votes. This despite the Upvote button being huge and red and the Follow button being hard to find.
Looking around the launch dashboard, I saw an interesting correlation. The count of “Upvotes” was equal to the count of my voters who had launches on Product Hunt + votes that were attributed to LinkedIn and X the Twitter. As Upvotes grew, these counts grew accordingly.
So my guess is that Product Hunt discards all upvotes that
- don’t come from previously active members
- can’t be attributed to a social network (or rather, don’t use the share links provided by PH)
as bots. And as an upvote supposedly comes with a follow, an upvote “moderated” away still leaves the follow. So “follows” for fresh products seem to be the real measure of upvotes.
Roughly estimated, comparing my follower count with the upvote numbers of apps on the front page, if all my legit upvoters were attributed accordingly, I would have ended up above the fold on the front page, receiving votes from front page visitors, giving me good chances to reach at least the top 10.
Despite these mighty measures, a few products that were, not on, but next to the podium looked like absolute slop with hard-to-understand slides generated in Claude Design and were using obvious bot votes, leaving many genuinely useful apps below.
Good thing the podium places were occupied by really good-looking apps, thanks for that.
And regarding bots… during the launch I received many spam emails offering to buy upvotes for the launch :)
Maybe your app is just THAT bad?!
No, my app is quite nice, you can check it out yourself – thingstohave.app.
But if you are looking for an objective measure, let’s check the numbers.
The day before, I left a random comment with just the stuff that was on my mind in the “What are you working on?” thread on HN. I wrote it sleepy, with one hand on my phone, and I struggle to remember if I bothered checking the grammar.
My comment got 6 upvotes, two very complimentary comments from complete strangers (thank you!), and two new signups. One of the users used the app very extensively and made his first public piece of UGC the same day.
This is a screenshot of my app analytics on the day of the Product Hunt launch. As you can see, I got orders of magnitude more traffic from a simple comment than from a well-prepared Product Hunt launch.
Does this mean that PH is useless?
Not completely. I think you may still launch your product on Product Hunt.
It’s a weak but constant source of traffic you can get for free, and an improvement to Domain Rating. Places where you can get both of those for free and in an ethical manner are rare.
Just don’t put a lot of effort into it. If you are a small indie maker, you will be outcompeted by apps with AI-written text, comments and slides. Your existing, real app audience will be marked as bots, while those slop apps will buy votes from vetted accounts.
Well-funded apps with well-connected makers with a large (10k+) audience also have a chance to get to the podium. But I’m not sure that such a launch can be considered free, so it must be balanced against the output.
P.S. Launching a product on Product Hunt also unleashes a storm of spam towards your product email. In fact, I got more spam emails than pageviews!