Idea for a Hunt log

Startup life is about MVPs, shipping early, and shipping often. It’s about iterations and constant improvement.

Startup life is also about visibility and traction. One of the best ways to get a healthy dose of both is to submit your project to Product Hunt. If all goes well, your servers will be hammered with traffic and your dreams might start to materialize.

But life doesn’t always go according to plan…

Picture a scenario where you spend time making something, launching it, getting feedback and iterating. While you focus on ironing out bugs, perfecting visual designs, and improving user onboarding, something terrible happens:

Somebody adds your project to Product Hunt!

Why’s that terrible?

With Product Hunt, you only get one shot. That puts a lot of pressure on creators to manage a successful launch. Any internet user with a PH account can jump the gun on your behalf at any time.

If that happens at a stage where you’re less than happy with your project, you may never get that big launch. You may just get an upvote or two on a horribly timed submission by someone you don’t even know.

That’s harsh. And unfair!

Yeah, but so is life. However here’s a possible solution. Product Hunt could adopt an exclusion standard for submissions.

Every website has (or should have) a robots.txt file that lets robots and web scrapers know what the laws of the land are for the site.

Some websites also have a nifty humans.txt file with information about the team, contributors, and misc people involved in creating them.

Product Hunt could adopt something similar. It would be pretty cool to allow project makers to add a product_hunt.txt file that would signal to the PH web scraper whether or not a project is ready to be hunted.

A key like status with a value of either ready or not-ready could be the difference between allowing a hunter to submit the site, or being told via the PH UI that this project is not hunt ready yet.

And another thing…

That’s pretty much the gist of it. But the idea could be taken even further. Pre-ready hunts could still be saved and tallied up in a hunt log. Once a site is hunt-ready and is hunted for real, all of the pre-hunt hunts that are saved in the log could be added to the launch score.

Yeah right! That’ll be gamed.

It might. But then maybe adding a rule like “any pre-hunt project with a certain hunt threshold will be hunted regardless of the status in the product_hunt.txt file” could solve that.

Or something…