Why Product Hunt Doesn’t Work Anymore — #2 Product of the Day

Yesterday, we had a launch at Producter and made it to the #2 Product of the Day. Yet, we still think that it’s not worth it. Here are reasons why launching on Product Hunt doesn’t work anymore..

Yesterday, we had a launch at Producter and made it to the #2 Product of the Day. Yet, we still think that it’s not worth it.

Here are reasons why launching on Product Hunt doesn’t work anymore:

The algorithm is gamed

As a team, we watched the competition from Product Wars’ dashboard, and we realized metrics were growing very strange. Both on the dashboard and Product Hunt itself..

Though our efforts created organic traffic from our community, other products were generating traffic at an astronomical rate.

We notified the Product Hunt Team 14 hours before the end of the day about the situation. However, they deleted bot upvotes from the top 3 products with only 1 hour left in the competition.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter when you intervene and delete votes with just 1 hour left.

Besides, during the day, our team got weird messages from people who promised that they could make us the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt.

Since they were so confident about breaking the algorithm, they made sure they got paid at the end of the day. Of course, we rejected and stopped putting effort into it when we realized that competing was unfair and irrational.

Takes a huge time + Gives very little

We get prepared as a team and put decent amount of effort into creating our launch strategy. We created content, distributed it on every single product community and shared with our own audience days ago.

Now, looking at our results — 2 hours after the competition ends:

We analyzed the quality of the workspaces created and its effect on our key metrics.

It shows that putting that much effort into Product Hunt cost you a lot of time.

It’s a trade-off that should be considered well. As for us, I don’t think that we’re going to waste too much energy next time.

• Using Product Hunt still might be a good marketing channel, as long as you put less effort into it.
• Most importantly, don’t make plans based on the fact that you’ll be launching on Product Hunt.
• It’s just another channel, not a magic wand. Keeping your focus on the real metrics will help you grow more than creating hype.

Special thanks to our amazing team and everyone supporting us throughout the day. The result doesn’t matter. You made our day with your endless support.🤍

Producter is a product management tool designed to become customer-driven. It helps you create collect feedback, manage tasks, sharing product updates, creating product docs, and tracking roadmap.

Originally published at https://blog.producter.co on November 18, 2022.