Here are the official Product Hunt guidelines:
https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt-7c1843e06399
"Feel free to hunt your own product. Having someone else posting is fine, but spending lots of time “finding a hunter” is a distraction. You know your product better than anyone else, and it makes very little difference who hunts the product and how well it performs overall."
DON'T BELIEVE A SINGLE WORD OF IT! YOU'LL FAIL MISERABLY IF YOU HUNT YOUR OWN PRODUCT YOURSELF.
You must know that if you're not hunted by an influential hunter, then your product won't appear at the bottom of the rankings of the day as you would expect. Instead your product will automatically land in a separate listing named "newest" which is a deathtrap. Only a handful of products will have the luck to be featured and escape this dead end. The current system is a huge waste, with a majority of products failing miserably without having a single chance to succeed. PH visitors never get to see those products, and developers are kept wondering what they've done wrong. As a PH visitor, I thought that only a couple of dozen products were launched on PH each day. I was shocked to discover that it's in fact more than 100:
https://www.indiehackers.com/@Destiner/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt-and-drown-in-the-sea-of-products-68de8da4f4
When a product fails, it's not necessarily because it's bad. It's more likely that it was sacrificed and didn't get any eyeball at all.
I think your energy would be better focused on your product and trying to find some customers.
You've spent a whole day now posting about how unfair the product hunt process is because you weren't featured and that just isn't productive.
Yep, back to work! I'm done now.
I didn't spend the whole day complaining. I spent it trying to understand, and this is the conclusion of my investigation.
I hope that my experience will serve others. Look at the blog post that I linked to. The guy is just disappointed, he never realized what trap he fell into.
Just an FYI that I can't read your landing page on mobile (you have "overflow: hidden" set on your #page container).
Thanks a lot for your help, much appreciated! I've removed "overflow: hidden". Apparently there are other problems (the background is chopped) that I'll try to understand and fix too.
No worries, if you're doing the HTML/CSS yourself I'd recommend using something like https://picturepan2.github.io/spectre/index.html to make your life easier.
I'll have a look at it. Because my app is a desktop app, I admit I've neglected how my website looks on a smartphone.
You could also take a look at bulma.io. It's great for rapidly coding up interfaces that are responsive and look great, even without touching that much custom CSS :-).
Thank you. For the moment, I don't plan to make a complete rewrite of my website. I will only fix the few problems that occur on a smartphone.
Hunted my own product on a whim. Got #1 Product of the day and #2 Product of the week.
Believe it or not: a) the product matters more than the rest b) there's a lot of luck involved. 🤷♂️
If all you did is hunt your own product, then your luck was to be featured by the PH team. I say "luck" but in your case it was an obvious decision if your product was #1.
The issue that I'm pointing with this post is that 2/3 of the products submitted to PH are thrown directly to the trash without being shown to the PH visitors. Losing a race is one thing, but being disqualified before the race begins is another thing.
I believe PH/HN/IH or anything real world is basically a system, where there are rules and ways to game/optimize the system.
If we expect to just launch and forget, we would probably fail.
I think most successful launch would involve one or more of the following
Everything you said is true. The problem is that the PH guidelines are misleading. They make you think that those points are optional, but if you don't do any of the first 3 points, and if your app isn't one of the handful featured by the PH team, then your launch is finished before it started. 2/3 of the products make that deadly mistake! Such a waste isn't necessary. The system could simply list all the products, and a featured product would simply jump up the list. That's how I thought that the system was working, I had never heard about this "Newest" purgatory, and visibly a majority of developers suffer from the same misunderstanding. If you know how the system works, it's possible to do with it (or to give up and save your time). That's why I've written this post, to make sure that everyone understands how the system really works. And my final advice is to be hunted, because if you compare with the other alternatives, it's by far the best solution.
Yup, lesson learned. I wish there is a better way to be hunted beside asking influential strangers for help (from an introvert perspective). Maybe there is a need for a pre-PH launch thing ;)
PS: Even though Google SEO guidelines ask us to focus on good content and a few basic tips (no paid links, low-quality content farm, etc.), that doesn't stop people from gaming the algorithm from time to time.
I feel exactly the same. If I had known all this beforehand, I think I would have just given up and saved a lot of time. Well, maybe I would have tried to find a hunter, but I certainly wouldn't have done the last option which is to gather enough upvotes before the launch (by begging on Slack groups, Facebook groups, IndieHackers, etc... nope, not for me).
I think you may have to at some point face the reality that it isn't Product Hunt that's lacking- there's a reason why it's one of the most popular websites in the world to launch a product on, and some of the most popular products sometimes start out being featured on Product Hunt, especially in the IH community. Your product is your baby, and when people don't see it the same way you do, it sucks. Almost everyone here will relate to that feeling. But the solution is not to whine about how it's not fair, your product would have been #1 for the day if you had had a good hunter. In my opinion that's simply not true. I'm not trying to pick fights, but look at some of the highly rated products. Their post doesn't look like yours, and neither does the product. It looks rough by 2018 standards.
Product Hunt is a good way to launch your product, but a bad product won't have a good launch anywhere. I would know! I've created several products and spent years on projects that literally no one would ever look at or care about. I've had launches like yours that flopped miserably on Product Hunt because they sucked. I didn't think that at the time, but no wonder they failed so miserably!
I've never seen, and I doubt you will ever see a successful Indie Hacker, here or anywhere else, whine about how someone else's platform didn't do their product justice. Take accountability.
Now is not the time to wallow and whine about Product Hunt's algorithm. Hone your skills, build something that solves a problem, and you'll do just fine, and more than likely you'll make it to the featured section no problem- influential hunter or not.
I'm not whining. I've spotted a trap and I try to warn everyone because clearly a ton of developers fall into that trap without even realizing. The information that I give in this post is very important and I would have loved to know about it before I launched on PH. If I had known, maybe my product would have flopped anyway, but at least I wouldn't have that feeling that I was cheated by the system. My product didn't have its chance precisely because I had followed the official PH guidelines. Don't you think it's a serious problem?
I never said that. Instead of being discarded, the not featured products should just be kept at the bottom of the ranking list, and many of them would probably find an audience, even modest. As it is, 2/3 of the products are directly thrown to the garbage without any respect for the hard work of the developers.
There is no trap. Take responsibility. You keep trying to find excuses, blaming others and the system. That's not the mindset of someone who wants to grow, it's the mindset of someone who doesn't want to change.
It's the mindset of someone who tries to warn others, so they don't make the same mistakes. The PH guidelines are misleading, it's a fact. Unfortunately, a little-known fact.
In fact, you don't need to get hunted. You can be the maker & hunter.
I launched https://remotejobsclub.com yesterday and within an hour it hit home-page. It seems like, that PH algorithms are set out to automatically feature products that drive massive traffic to a specific PH listing (mixed with upvotes), so if you have an email list/big twitter following or you are able to leverage your personal connections, you can succeed by posting it yourself.
If you're not hunted, you automatically go to the "Newest" section purgatory. You confirm it's what happened to you for 1 hour. Indeed, a few products get out of there by being featured by the PH team, but there's no guarantee at all. Now that you're in the "Newest" section, your last option is to send people to your page to get enough upvotes to get out of here. But that solution isn't easy because:
I agree with you that this option exists, but it's so complicated that it's probably easier to find an influential hunter who will make you instantly featured. You'll directly be in the "popular" section where people can actually see you.
Good points, I did not know the algorithm was that complicated.
I didn't know either, and if you count the number of products that end up with 2 or 3 upvotes, I'd say that 2/3 of the developpers didn't understand either how important it is to be hunted or at least to collect a bunch of upvotes on your own to get you started. For my defense, the PH guidelines have completely fooled me.
I hunted my product and I managed to accumulate only about 10 upvotes from my few followers/family/some friends. I still got featured though and managed to stay on the main page for almost the entire day. Not sure exactly how their algorithm works.
Maybe your 10 upvotes were enough to make you featured, maybe your product was hand-picked by the PH team. My point is that the vast majority of products fail because they wrongly think that submitting is enough.
Probably my product wouldn't have flopped if I had asked my friends to upvote me out of the "Newest" purgatory. But I had never heard about that issue and it took me the day to figure out. I didn't ask anyone to upvote me because I had read that you are penalized when new users register to upvote you. I had prepared my launch, I had followed all the rules, and in the end I felt cheated. This post is to warn everyone. It's important to understand that the PH process can quickly turn into a deathtrap. Nowhere I've seen warnings about this "Newest" cemetery. In my opinion, considering all the options, the best choice is by far to be hunted.
hmm, I guess we'll never really know exactly how they handle things. I do remember that I had at least 3 friends that made an account just to upvote me so apparently I wasn't really penalized for that. I did notice in my time following PH on Twitter that they are really active there. I tweeted and mentioned the PH page a couple of times. Maybe that helped as well.
Your tweet gave some visibility to your page. Meanwhile on PH, your page had almost zero visibility while it stayed in the "Newest" section.