Disappointing product hunt launch

Chaos Before the Launch

So, we decided to launch on 29th November, but due to some technical issues, we decided to delay it to 6th December. However, we were unable to select the date due to some glitch. So, I contacted Product Hunt support, and they set the date from their end.

After that, we launched our productized service, Engage Enhance, on Product Hunt the day before yesterday.

Before the launch, I decided to add the Product Hunt upvotes badge on my website. To my surprise, we usually get a tab in Product Hunt saying “product name launch tips,” but this time it was displaying the name of my upcoming launch on 13th for AppMintAI. I ignored it, thinking it must be a glitch, so I just got it from the product page.

First 4 Hours

Everything looked normal, but I noticed that Engage Enhance is not visible on the home page. I thought that’s because all products are shuffling.

Everything was going well; we had around 80-90 upvotes.

But then, after the first 4 hours,

I was very excited for the rank reveal at 5:30 pm my time, but to my surprise, they did not reveal the rank for our product. I was in shock and disbelief.

At first, I thought it was a glitch because they set the date from their end and decided to contact support regarding it.

After contacting support, I decided to contact Rohan. He is very helpful and hunted our product as well. He told us that not all products get featured on the home page, and it’s decided totally by them. There are no guidelines for it and suggested me to request them to review the product again.

I then sent them a request. I was very optimistic, as I also read the exact same story here from being hidden to rank 3. The same thing happened with them; they were not ranked but according to upvotes were on rank 7, coincidentally like us. They were also hunted by Rohan; they also requested to review again and got approved around 11:30 pm.

I received a reply from them at 10 pm my time asking for the product link. I was very excited and thought we would get featured.

At 10:30 pm, I received this reply from them:

“Hi,
Thank you for sharing the information. While this was reviewed earlier, we are always happy to take another look 🙏
At this time, it is not eligible to be featured since it is a service. We limit the amount of services on our homepage based on direct feedback from our community. While we always support services launching, we have found that the homepage is not the best fit, which is why it has not been featured.
We appreciate your understanding.
Best”

I was very disappointed because we worked very hard, supported every launch from the last 2 months to get the much-needed support from the community, messaged so many people asking for the support if they like what we are doing.

We finished with around 220 upvotes, but I am sure we would have got a lot more if we were on the home page, maybe even the first rank.

There were no paid sign-ups because of reaching very fewer people. We get a lot of reach from the home page, as you all know.

It felt very unfair to be stuck there for no reason. Even the products like Design Joy launched on Product Hunt; they were also a service.

I understand that there are a lot of products that launch daily, but according to me, it should be based on upvotes, something like the top 50 products will get featured.

I have also not messaged their new CEO about this; let’s see if I get any response :)

I am gearing up for my next Product Hunt launch. Let’s see how it goes. If you like, you can support it here:

https://www.producthunt.com/products/app-mint-ai

Thank you very much for reading till here :)