Last time, I went to bed at 10pm and set my alarm for 3am, but I woke up randomly at 1:45am and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I just started my day then.īut you know what? 2am my time is 8am in London, so all those chaps are starting to check out Product Hunt and upvote stuff and they’ll come to your live chat on your site that got hunted and start asking questions and you need to be online to talk to them and try to get them to order or do customer discovery or extract whatever value you can out of them.Īnd after you say cheerio to all the British blokes then you have people in Eastern Europe waking up and then Japan and Australians because it’s evening time already over there because the world is a globe and it’s nuts and they’ll start talking to you. I mean I live in Nashville, which is two hours ahead of California, so when I get something on Product Hunt, I want it up at 12:01am PST ideally, so I set my alarm for 2 or 3am, and go to bed pretty early. And since it’s the posting is based on the day, you want to post your product super early in the day. But that’s the thing: you will have no control, no idea what else will come up, and an airplane or anything else can keep you out of the top spot. Getting beat by a plane doesn’t really make sense because it’s a goddamned airplane and this is supposed to be techy geeky nerdy startup stuff, not aircraft. I was beat out by a new feature by Spotify, and by Amazon’s new cargo plane. When I did my most recent Product Hunt launch, I ended up in third place. I wanted to get the number one spot that day, so we waited until the next day to post.īut that is the thing, the next day, it could have been something even more popular posted, and I would have been screwed. If I remember correctly, Pocket had just released a new feature or something, and by 9am had a ton of traction. When we were going to post my first project to Product Hunt, there was a bigger company getting a lot of attention. Problem #3: Who else will post something that day?

Pray for a miracle, but it probably won’t come. You’re not allowed to ask for upvotes, and they’re pretty serious about this, so you can’t just ask everyone you know to help you out. People will not go out of their way to look, so you will be there forever. But how will it get upvotes, when no one really looks there? On the mobile Product Hunt app, you don’t even see the option to check out the “Newest” area. If it gets a ton of upvotes in there, it may get out and make it onto the front page. But it’s now your purgatory, and your startup will be there eternally. If you don’t have front page credentials yourself and you don’t get someone with them to post for you, your startup goes to an area called “Newest” (it used to be called “Upcoming”). Who do you know that posts a lot to Product Hunt? Do they have frontpage credentials? Can you butter them up so that they will post a project for you? Problem #2: The “Newest” area, or startup purgatory If you know someone with frontpage credentials, awesome! I do, and that’s the only way I’ve ever had “luck” on Product Hunt.īut I say “luck” in quotes because it’s all about making your own luck. This is a bit mysterious, but it seems to be their earliest adopters who have these privileges, and some celebrities within the startup world. Some people, not many, but some people have credentials to post straight to the front page. Just like with American Presidential politics, Product Hunt is about who you know.

Problem #1 with Product Hunt: Nepotism is required Turn off your desire for instant glory from Product Hunt, and you’ll have a much better day when your startup hits the home page. Sales galore.ĭid you ever study Buddhism, that the cause of all suffering is actually desire? It might come into play here… If you get to the top of the home page, you’ll be sitting pretty, right? Not a care in the world, because all of a sudden you have BOOM revenue.

Way to show off your Startup to the world. What started as a little newsletter has turned into a behemoth.

Product hunt live chat