Product Hunt leaderboard sucks. I built a better one using no-code tools.

I'm a non-technical guy, and I linked up a few various tools and API calls using Integromat and created a PH leaderboard where you can see the top 20 products sorted by days, in chronological order. That's how cool no-code is.

I found it really surprising that PH doesn't have a leaderboard like this. Sure, you can scroll down endlessly to see all of the products ranked by upvote count but that's really annoying.

Now you might be thinking, but who would use this? To be perfectly honest i don't know. It can be a nice tool as an inspiration, but here's why i made it:

I love creating no-code workflows. They are so fun to build, and i always discover new tools and learn new stuff. As a non-technical guy, it was pretty intimidating at first but once i understood the basics it was pretty easy.

As a part of our marketing at Plainly, which is a video generation API, i create in-depth articles on no-code workflows that involve video automation. This works good for our SEO and shows potential users what are the possible use cases. As part of every article i actually make the workflow and explain every step.

In this case, a social media video is created for every top 3 product by Plainly. This way, if your product is in the top 3, you can download a super nice social media video completely free and share it around to brag.

This was by far the most challenging workflow. I almost didn't make it. It involved a new type of API call, called GraphQL, which was super strange to me, but somehow i ghetto hacked it and it works!

After reading a ton of documentation and figuring out GraphQL, the workflow ended up being pretty simple.

Every day, just before the CET day ends, i scrape the top 20 products and put them into an Airtable sheet. That sheet is embedded on our website and the products are grouped by days.

Then Plainly takes top 3 of those products, automatically creates a video for each, and uploads that to another sheet.

I'll admit, the Airtable sheet embedded on our website wasn't my initial idea.

Sure, for the top 20 leaderboard it's okay...but i didn't want to display the videos like that. I wanted to embed the videos themselves on the page, and update them every day. I just couldn't make that work. That part was a bit out of my technical reach so i had to settle for a, slightly shittier, alternative.

It's been so fun building this out. If you want to check it out, you can do so at:

https://plainlyvideos.com/tools/product-hunt-leaderboard/

Follow me for more no-code advice, and make sure to hit that bell icon....i'm just joking - don't do that, i don't know what i'm doing.