Launched PrivacyHunt feature on ProductHunt

We built a quick feature to practice launching on ProductHunt. We called it PrivacyHunt. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/privacy-hunt

The real purpose was for us to practice and learn on how to launch on ProductHunt. We placed number 6 globally just using our personal networks to engage and attracted organic attention from some top Hunters.

What did this cost us? 15 hours of non-developer's time searching copying and pasting in airtable.

Our longer debrief:

Today, we launched a crowd-sourced privacy tool: Privacy Hunt on Product Hunt. We wanted to gain some experience on Product Hunt, gain some followers, without investing developer resources. This was a dry run for the launch of the Rownd Data Privacy Platform in January 2021.

We built Privacy Hunt on an airtable database and used OOTB low-code code snippets to build the UX/UI. We intentionally put it in the Rownd landing page, so we could get other traction. We invested ~15 hours of non-developer time (Rob’s time) to “hunt” privacy policies and find data request forms, build the site, and prepare the campaign.

Overall outcome: Worth every minute of investment. We are #6 in the world and got comments and upvotes from some of the most prosperous Product Hunters around. Not too bad for a dry run!

Lessons Learned:

Overall lessons:
There is a HUGE number of up-voters for hire. When we found ourselves in the top ten, we got ~10-15 messages, linkedin requests, and emails offering to trade $$ for upvotes. Need to keep that in mind in the future as we may be competing against bots.
A well known hunter basically guarantees a top 5 product.
Need a timezone strategy. Starting the day (6am EST) in the top 5 basically guarantees that they stay there, since it is above the fold. All five had over 40 upvotes by 6am. Ours came in as our networks (and a huge number of organic upvotes) started to come in. But most of those networks are in the US. Momentum builds on momentum.
(Already knew this, but worth repeating). This is NOT about winning the top 5 (top 5 does pull away and get more organic); it is about finding good users, partners, and useful feedback.