What I learned from the first hour of launching on Product Hunt

A year ago Product Hunt released an update to give new products a 'level playing field' for the first few hours of launch.

The disclaimer reads, "For the first 4 hours of the day, we're hiding upvotes to help every product get a chance to catch your interest".

But just how fair is this update, anyways?

A few weeks ago I launched my first product on Product Hunt. For the first hour of launch, I refreshed the page every few minutes to see how other products were doing with votes.

To my surprise I noticed that most products, including mine, still have their vote count visible. Only a subset of products had a little "–" below the upvote icon, to hide the upvote count.

Here's the kicker: these products may not have the upvote count, but they were already featured on a "Top products launching today" wall on the homepage.

What resulted was two sets of products: a shortlist of "featured products" on the front page that was given a 'level playing field' amongst each other, and all the other "non-featured" products.

My hypothesis when I first saw this in action was that "featured" products don't really benefit from hidden vote counts – they're on the front page from the very first minute and thus already have an uneven advantage.

I decided to test this out. After the first hour, I tallied up what % of top-performing apps (by # of votes) were "featured" versus "non-featured".

Results:

• All but one of the 16 "featured" products had more than 10 upvotes in the first hour. The average was 33 votes / product.

• By contrast, only 5 "non-featured" products had more than 10 upvotes in the first hour. The average was 30.6 votes / product. [1]

Featured products had about 10% higher average upvotes in the first hour. And the extremes were even wider (some had more than 60 votes by the first hour).

More surprisingly, featured products outnumbered non-featured in the top-performing list by 3x.

This could be because they did better launch prep. But could also be correlated to being featured on the homepage.

When the day ended, I wanted to see if this head-start helped push these products into the Top 10.

Again, I tallied up the results and found that only 2 of the "non-featured" products ended up in Top 10, in contrast to 4 of the "featured" products. [2]

In the next Top 11-20, there was an even bigger ratio of featured : non-featured products.

It's unclear how this shortlist of products is decided ahead of a launch (perhaps a curation by the PH team of products they predict they do well. May even be based on the Hunter and Maker's reputation).

But one thing was very clear: making it into this shortlist gives products an outsized advantage for the first few hours, which propels them even further up in the final end-of-day rankings.

Product Hunt launches can already be a bit unfair given time zone differences and existing communities around a company or maker.

So I hope this little post gives other indie makers an insight on just how important – and imperfect – those first few hours of launch are.

Don't underestimate the value of announcing your launch everywhere as soon as the clock hits midnight Pacific, and try to ensure there is a group of people awake and willing to support your product in the first hour.

It might just be the difference between a failed [3] versus life-changing product launch.

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[1] Dataset (in no order) was [18, 77, 31, 25, 11, 17, 52, 42, 23, 62, 20, 28, 64, 14, 14] votes for 15 of the 16 featured products, and [35, 11, 20, 40, 47] votes for the 5 'non-featured' products that cracked more than 10 votes in the first hour.

[2] For PH rankings on January 11th, 2024. Non-featured: Olly, hoopsAI. Featured: Hey calendar, GPT Auth, Feather, Prompt Whisperer. The remaining ones in the Top 10 weren't launched in the first hour.

[3] Define this by your own standards. My first PH launch, TemplateAI, did better than I expected but still failed as per my own goals.