We failed with a Product Hunt launch, but the outcome was a happy surprise
Here lies a story of how an epic perceived failure can turn out to be a magnificent experience.
I’ve been helping out a company called Howspace recently. Howspace is a digital facilitation platform that had not been adequately launched in the U.S., even though Howspace has some great customers across the States.
As part of our strategy to strengthen our position in North America, we decided to launch on Product Hunt. For those that don’t know, Product Hunt is a website where people share and discover new products. Product Hunt is one of the leading locations for finding all sorts of new apps, websites, products, and services.
And it is incredibly popular.
According to Similarweb, producthunt.com gets almost five million monthly visits. It’s the website Slack used to propel its launch.
Product Hunt is relatively simple. All new products “hunted” show up in a daily feed. The Product Hunt community gets involved by voting for their favorites, asking questions, posting comments, and writing reviews.
Each day a new product gets crowned as the #1 Product Of The Day. The winner is not just based on the number of votes and comments but is balanced by, and based on, a proprietary algorithm.
What were our goals?
Some days, you can be awarded #1 Product of the day with less than 500 upvotes, but on most days, you need to be on the better side of 1000 upvotes. That’s why set a goal of getting 1000 upvotes, winning #1 Product Of The Day, and getting 50 free trial customers.
How we planned our launch
We planned our launch carefully. We made a spreadsheet for all the tasks, wrote instructions for the team, and even created templates for reaching out to customers, partners, and friends. I requested that each person would reach out to at least ten people.
We made sure a top hunter, Stewart Rogers, hunted Howspace. One of the best practices on Product Hunt is that someone outside of the product team hunts the solution, and the makers then interact with the post and engage with their comments.
We knew that a new day starts on Product Hunt at 10 am Finnish time, which is midnight in the US Pacific time zone (Product Hunt was invented in Silicon Valley.) However, we thought that it might be a good idea to launch when it was 2 pm Finnish time, which is early morning on the East Coast to get an equal stream of engagement in both the U.S. and Europe.
What was the experience like inside the company?
After our launch, we immediately started seeing a lot of upvotes and comments. Our customers were happy to write reviews.
However, to our surprise, we failed to get into the top five even though we were quickly in the top three based on engagement. This caused quite a bit of frustration.
We knew there was nothing we could do about the algorithm, so we just decided to keep pushing. Importantly, we never asked our friends, colleagues, and clients to vote on our listing. We just asked them to check it out, and if they wanted to ask questions, we’d be there all day to reply.
We had read some rumors about how the algorithm favors upvotes from long-time Product Hunt users. Still, we were hoping the sheer volume of our backers would push us to the top three, which would put us in an excellent position to build more momentum with the “regular Product Hunt audience.”
Our team worked tirelessly throughout the day, engaging with people familiar with Howspace. Still, suddenly we started seeing that while we’re getting more and more upvotes, comments, and reviews, our ranking was declining.
It started to seem obvious that the algorithm penalized us for having so much engagement from new P.H. users, although since we don’t know how the Product Hunt algorithm works, this is just a hypothesis. While I understand the logic of that, it didn’t feel fair as we had not gamed the system by buying or asking for upvotes. We received genuine upvotes from satisfied customers.
I stopped monitoring Product Hunt around 10 pm, feeling confused. I knew we’d have the final results at 10 am Finnish time the next day.
When I woke up, I immediately checked the situation with my phone. No change, we were way outside of the top ten.
Results
Here’s what the results looked like after a new day started on Product Hunt.
Product Hunt Rankings 24.6.
We had 5th most upvotes and by far the most comments, but we were 21st!
When I listed the results above, I forgot to track the number of positive reviews as they are not listed in the feed, but we won that category by a mile. To give you an idea, as of now, Howspace has 176 positive reviews, whereas CodeStream Code Review has 46, Reveal 82, and Zelf 125.
In terms of free trial signups, we only got one through the Product Hunt special offer banner we displayed on our website during the launch.
Aftermath
I felt awful. I had spent quite a bit of time preparing for the launch. What made me feel worse was that it was my initiative that had caused everyone in the team to spend a lot of time and effort without getting the credit they deserved. I posted a message on our Slack, sharing my emotions.
The first response immediately made me feel better.
Messages like that might seem like small gestures, but they can go a long way.
I then started to summarize the results. I had been so focused on the Product Hunt metrics and the algorithm that I had failed to grasp what was happening.
I had not realized what kind of messages we had received in the comments from our customers. I went back to our Slack and here’s what I found:
I realized that our customers’ positive words had given an enormous uplift for the people in our team. I also realized that many others also monitored Product Hunt late in the evening, which shows how deep their commitment is.
Here’s another example of how the customers’ comments made people feel:
I started to realize that even if we failed to win the #1 Product Of The Day, we had learned other precious things. When we needed a team effort, the team delivered.
And even if Product Hunt’s algorithm didn’t give us credit, we had received positive testimonials from 100+ customers. That is a pretty insane number when you stop to think of it. As Sanni, who runs Howspace marketing, pointed out she had experienced how difficult it can be to get any testimonials from customers in other workplaces. We had collected more than 100 within 24 hours.
Here are three of my personal favorites.
I realized that even if people inside Howspace knew we have a great product, a stellar customer success team, and fantastic clients, it was our customers’ comments on public record that gave us validation.
This started to sink in when Sanni posted our results on LinkedIn, and she got a comment like this:
As I am writing this, we have 538 upvotes, 252 comments, and 176 positive reviews. Howspace is the 17th most commented product in the productivity category of all time, with more comments than Notion, Hey, or Slack!
Learnings and outcomes
The whole company put in a colossal effort, and that shows how committed everyone is. Ultimately, that is the result of a fantastic team and incredible leadership.
And most importantly, we have seen how our customers view our product. Their engagement proves we have an excellent product and an exemplary customer success team that provides a fantastic customer experience.
So while many would consider this a failure, from a purely metrics-based perspective, we consider the experience a win, even if the Product Hunt algorithm didn’t agree.
P. S. Check out our Product Hunt page: Producthunt.com/posts/howspace
