Having consumed the launch leaderboard of Product Hunt routinely over the years, it has always been in the back of my mind as a vehicle to boost one of my side projects. Admittedly, until now, I have not had something that felt "worthy" of launching on Product Hunt. If you look only at the winners, it seems like a fast way to a profitable SaaS or paid app, but I was conveniently ignoring the hundreds of launches which fall on deaf ears each day. Little did I know, it was the latter category I was bound to join.
The commercial angle for Product Hunt is obvious - paid campaigns for positive placement. It's unfortunate that the core offering of the app (ranking new apps) is allowed to be "cheated" by those who already have capital behind them. It also helps if you have an audience that you can prompt to upvote your listing, but it does feel like a bit of a breach of trust if you can essentially pay for upvotes by gaining visibility. The concept of shadow-banning on social media shows that enforced obscurity is far more effective at demoralising and maligning people than outright deleting them from the platform.
I was originally slated to launch on the 25th of August, which in hindsight turned out to be the third busiest day of launches in the history of the site, with 1,146 total launches. In the end I was busy that evening (UTC+10 represent), so I moved it to the 26th instead. This was still a very heavy day at 899 launches with the top listing being x1 - "lovable for iPhone apps". Unsurprisingly, a product which offers to print money for people with vibe coded apps resonates quite a bit. I don't mean to deride them, but I have to imagine the high-water mark of 1,146 launches is going to be eclipsed again with more services like this becoming available.
None of this is to say "My app is great and worthy, and all of the other 899 apps are slop". I believe mine offers a valuable service, but it is admittedly niche. The tags I hit of "open source" and "self-hosted" appear in roughly 1% and 4% of taglines respectively. You could look at that as un-tapped ground, or a signal that those products don't tend to do well.
So, what did my launch actually get me?
I garnered a grand total of 1 upvote, and one referral from Product Hunt on my analytics. The interesting part to me has been all of the spam email in the wake of the launch. My inbox on the app domain has essentially been poisoned with pitches.
The first email came from something called the Upvote Network, which offered to assist me in my launch using their network of 500 legitimate profiles to upvote my product (at the low price of $0.99 per upvote!). Some of the emails were just un-welcome spam about which subreddits I can engagement farm in, but there is an interesting category of product I am now acquainted with. There were a bunch like BacklinkLog, InsightScout and others which offer to give me some nice backlink juice for my website SEO at varying price points.
Another category of product is the App Directory. LaunchBuff, KrispiTech, NextGen Tools, Viberank, Buildlist, CodeTrendy, SitePatent, and more. All of these scrape Product Hunt listings, generate a one-pager for it and offer to unlock it and reveal it to their (presumably massive) audiences for anywhere from $4.99 to $19.99. All of these seem to do exactly what Product Hunt does, except with none of the network or trust. They pick the losers of the day and say things like "Lector deserved an upvote", all of them claiming to have left an upvote to help my worthy cause. If I got an upvote from every one of these crawlers who claimed to have left an upvote, I actually might have got a bit of momentum in the charts!
What I learned
I suppose my takeaway from this has been that Product Hunt is just another permutation of the viral marketing you see elsewhere online. Success breeds success, and a high-ranking app on Product Hunt is bound to get a few buyers simply because if it's receiving this many upvotes it has to be good. The winner on the 25th (when I was planning to launch) is a product called akta.pro, and the first thing you see on their landing page is a quivering banner that says "#1 on Product Hunt". Product Hunt has obviously become something of a kingmaker in the industry, if it's worth this kind of placement.
Like many pursuits in life - building a business, relationship, skills, habits - success doesn't come from miraculous breakthroughs, but through "the same old boring strokes", compounded over time. Organic referral has been the most valuable source of traffic, and I have to be pleased with where I am. The marketing site for my app (lector.dev) has had 236 unique visitors, so small referral sources are each a gift on their own. I have had 6 visitors referred from Reddit, because one person said they've been enjoying using my app to learn Spanish. This referral was so curious and exciting that I went searching through Reddit to find the comment, and I was able to thank the user personally for their referral.
Growth is organic. ChatGPT is my top referrer at 88 visitors (disproportionately from Germany, interestingly). I can't say why it's recommending the app to a particular demographic, because I can ask Gemini for specific recommendations in my space and it will recommend different services to mine. It's certainly an interesting time with SEO becoming all but obsolete and search engine traffic cratering.
All things considered, the app is doing well. With my Plausible analytics as an indication, the conversion rate is remarkably high with 81 users signing up. Zero of the users are people I know as I simply haven't told people in my life to sign up for it.
So, for anyone else in my shoes, don't be discouraged if your Show HN post or Product Hunt launch gets buried. Just be consistent, build something that you think there's a need for, and you may be surprised by the outcome.