Postmortem of our Product Hunt launch

Recall launched on Product Hunt on the 9th of February and I have been meaning to do a writeup on my experience since then so here it is.

Preparation

We went into the launch quite confident having done all the recommended tasks and already having about 150 signups and 50 Twitter followers. My goal was to get into the top 3 for the day. Between me and my cofounder we had put together a list of about 50 friends and family members who we had told about the upcoming launch and asked them if they would upvote us on the day.

The launch

When the clock struck 12:01 PST I emailed all our existing users, tweeted and messaged our list of friends and family. For the first few hours we stayed in the top 5 and I continued to tweet, reply to comments and post about our launch in any online forum that was in any way related to Recall.

Later in the day more companies overtook us sometimes at unexplainable rates. There was one company that gained about 400 votes in about 2 hours.

As the gap between Recall and the top 3 kept getting bigger I came to realize I was probably not going to reach my goal. At the time I was pretty disappointed.

Paying for upvotes

On the day, I got multiple emails from people offering their “marketing service” which could guarantee Recall’s in a top position. After doing some searching I found that there were a lot of people offering similar services which really makes you wonder how many upvotes are legit. How well you do on Product Hunt can really steer the course for your startup so to be guaranteed a top position for under $100 is very tempting and I am sure a lot of people choose to go this route. I chose not too because it just felt wrong but in hindsight I am not sure I would make the same decision. Product Hunt should really be doing a better job at keeping bots off the platform, the quality of products you find there will continue to decline if they let bots control the rankings.

Curated directories are not products, IMO.

The “product” that won product of the day got a whopping 1900 votes. What was the product you ask? It was a guide on building online communities. I find this very strange and still do not understand why a guide would be voted product of the day. I often see Notion templates and curated resources doing very well on Product Hunt and I just don’t get why, they are not products. Even the all-time highest voted product on Product Hunt is a curated directory of resources (https://www.producthunt.com/search?q=*). I am not sure if I am the only one who feels this way? Let me know in the comments.

Our stats for the launch

We finished the day as product #10 which was obviously not what I was hoping for. Despite our low ranking we were still able to get:

• 493 website visits
• 157 signups

We were also included in the newsletter which kept the signups coming for about a week after the launch.

Conclusion

Despite my complaining here, I would absolutely recommend doing Product Hunt especially if your startup is consumer facing. Even though we only came 10th, we still got way more exposure than we have gotten from any other medium.