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Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

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Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#2

Post by ec109685 »

This is interesting data. A “failure over time and cohort” could be an interesting visualization. Similar to the cohort retention tables here: https://amplitude.com/blog/cohorts-to-improve-your-retention

It makes it easy to see based on when a product was featured whether it’s becoming more or less likely to fail after a given time period.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#3

Post by PragmaticPulp »

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting.

The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx.

Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot!

More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward.

Moreover, this analysis can’t actually account for products that have been shuttered but still have landing pages online. It’s ultra cheap to keep a placeholder “Sorry we’re closed” page online, so I imagine a lot of these projects are shutdown but counted as “success”.

Subjectively, this matches what I’ve gathered from watching PH. Getting a PH featured product listing seems to be a badge of honor, but PH users aren’t really interested in using 99% of the products and the submitters aren’t actually interested in building them past proof of concept. Recently, the bulk of postings seem to be advertisements for paid information products or pay-to-join communities.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#4

Post by daolf »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those proj…

I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts.

But anyway,

I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not.

And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd need to tag much more than 150 pages to have a significant statistical result.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#5

Post by runnerup »

daolf wrote: post #4
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those proj…

I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts. But anyway, I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not. And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd ne…

For what it's worth, you could watch how quickly the confidence intervals converge as you sample the data, to see if it's worth continuing or if the variance is too high and whether you'd have to check thousands of pages by hand:

   from scipy.stats import binomtest
   chance_of_dead_page = binomtest(landing_page_counter["dead"], landing_page_counter["total"]).proportion_ci(confidence_level=0.90)
   print(f'Chance of a dead but existing landing page (90% Confidence Interval):{chance_of_dead_page.low * 100:.2f}% to {chance_of_dead_page.high * 100:.2f}%')

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#7

Post by zaarn »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those proj…

Don't forget cases where a product's domain expired and has since be reused for something else entirely (or a product with similar goal but new vendor)

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#8

Post by nicoburns »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those proj…

> Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot!

Is that a lot? I would have been less surprised if it were 1/3rd of links still live.

Re: Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

#9

Post by martin_a »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those proj…

> More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward.

This would very well fit a "fail fast" attitude with testing MVPs, wouldn't it? At least that's what I would guess. Got a great start with PH but didn't move on from there, so the domain was not renewed...

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