what did you mean by "after clearing it with the Product Hunt crew." isn't the process just submitting your link?
What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice
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Re: What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice
#12I'd not even heard of product hunt, is it a UK only thing?
Its basically one of those scene pumping deals. Its seems more common in the art and music world than tech as far as I can tell. Get together with a group of people trying to do similar things and then make it look like you are more popular than you are by acting in concert with each other. For example liking each others posts, promoting each others projects on social media and in person. Essentially you give each other a fake buzz to get new things off the ground, like a head start. Then others from the outside looking in think that you have created that buzz organically and come to check out what all the excitement is about.
Re: What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice
#13At this point in time Product Hunt is only really known to a very small community of people
Yes, and it's a very niche demographic. I think Pete made a great point about bearing in mind where the feedback is from.
Re: What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice
#14I'd not even heard of product hunt, is it a UK only thing?
Its basically one of those scene pumping deals. Its seems more common in the art and music world than tech as far as I can tell. Get together with a group of people trying to do similar things and then make it look like you are more popular than you are by acting in concert with each other. For example liking each others posts, promoting each others projects on social media and in person. Essentially you give each ot…
hah, that is a super-negative interpretation of it. It is also a really one-sided view (only looking at it from the perspective of people who submit links). The bulk of their users will never submit anything, they just enjoy reading the posts, trying out the products and giving feedback. I'm not sure what you see as "fake" about the "buzz"? It isn't like they are bots. They are actual human beings who might even purchase the service or product.
Another view (a far more accurate view) is that it is a spin-off from Hacker News with a more focused topic. I quite enjoy the site, and I've never posted anything on it. Non-technical people and product focused people can find a lot of the stuff on HN outside of their interests where product hunt hits much closer to the bullseye, more consistently.
Re: What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice
#15Page hit count is a vanity metric. We were featured on PH and while it does indeed drive a lot of traffic, the quality of it is about the same as from StumbleUpon's paid discovery, i.e. near zero. They come, they see, they bounce. No conversion at all .
Agreed re: page views. As Peter pointed out, it really depends on the product. Founders have reported as little as 0.5% conversion to as high as 40% conversion from page view to purchase via PH.
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Re: What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice
#16Page hit count is a vanity metric. We were featured on PH and while it does indeed drive a lot of traffic, the quality of it is about the same as from StumbleUpon's paid discovery, i.e. near zero. They come, they see, they bounce. No conversion at all .
Agreed re: page views. As Peter pointed out, it really depends on the product. Founders have reported as little as 0.5% conversion to as high as 40% conversion from page view to purchase via PH.
I agree 100%. The author spells out explicitly that you should consider if the users of Product Hunt are in your demographic. Seems pretty smart, it would be like advertising a fast food app in a fitness magazine and then being upset that the conversion rate was low.
I also look at things like PH, HN and Reddit as tests of my product. I had a post about a new feature make the front page of Hacker News, the product is a Swift programming resource and I had 8500 views within 5-10 hours. After that, the shark fin died out and I'm back to nearly where I started. That tells me that I haven't quite figured it out.
An interesting difference (just observing my own behavior) is that every new feature I release, I submit to HN. But, I am waiting until a certain point to submit something to PH. I think it is because of Product Hunt's focus on Product that makes we want to only show things that are more "ready for primetime" .
I might be fooling myself, but I feel that the probability of meeting people interested in joining my cause in one way or another on PH is much higher than on HN. Obviously, that's just what my brain has decided on its own, no data to back that up.
Re: What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its basically one of those scene pumping deals. Its seems more common in the art and music world than tech as far as I can tell. Get together with a group of people trying to do similar things and then make it look like you are more popular than you are by acting in concert with each other. For example liking each others posts, promoting each others projects on social media and in person. Essentially you give each ot…
hah, that is a super-negative interpretation of it. It is also a really one-sided view (only looking at it from the perspective of people who submit links). The bulk of their users will never submit anything, they just enjoy reading the posts, trying out the products and giving feedback. I'm not sure what you see as "fake" about the "buzz"? It isn't like they are bots. They are actual human beings who might even purc…
I'm not saying it to be negative. Its the standard way to get any type of endevour that needs a network effect(hype) to get off the ground. When starting a band its really hard to get people to come to your shows and listen to your music. But if you get together with a group of other like minded bands and start pumping each other up, it looks like you are already popular and attracts attention. Standard scene building stuff.
I just wanted to clarify that Product Hunt does not appear to be an organically created phenomenon, but a very engineered process that from the looks of things was very well executed.
I could also be completely wrong.