About myself
I’m Binh Pham and I’m a serial product maker. I’ve built over 10 products since I was in secondary school, launched 3 of them on Product Hunt and got featured with 2: The Startup Place and Bigma.
I believe that a Product Hunt launch is merely about luck and is more about how you present your product with the world, especially the audience of Product Hunt.
That’s why I’ve been able to be featured with a 66,3% success rate on my first few tries, even with something that isn’t a product but merely a Proof of Concept.
In this article, I’ll dive into the economics of Product Hunt: the strategies which I’ve observed from people who make it big and small on this site. But first, I’ll set some ground rules.
Not every product is suitable for Product Hunt
Product Hunt was launched in 2013 and it was the site for people from all sorts of backgrounds to find a product that suits their needs.
While being a general product site, Product Hunt attracts a mainly geeky audience, containing builders and investors. This is reflected in their incoming and outgoing traffic, which mainly consists of developers and investors site.
From such data, we can easily observe that Product Hunt is upheld mainly by its own community of builders and investors.
And if you haven’t been through Product 101, there is a famous quote “great user reception comes with great solution for their problems”. From the traffic above, the users on Product Hunt are no other than the same people as you, aka builders.
Therefore, when you launch a product here, make sure that it is targeted to people who use the site the most.
If I build an app for builders, wouldn’t it be easier to validate my product if I, the creator, are the target audience?
It is a delicate situation and a tricky one. You can easily convince yourself of your ideas. It is best to hang out with other builders and ask for their feedback.
Looking into Product Hunt from the eyes of an economist
The economy of Product Hunt revolves around its main user demographic: builders and investors. At the center of this economy is a currency called upvotes and comments. It can be acquired by launching a product on Product Hunt. The currency is used to trade for something called “Product of the day” or “Product of the year”.
Trading happens mainly between builders of the site themselves, as reflected in above analysis. The produce of builders are products that are “sold” to get votes, after which it is weighted to get rankings. The “buyers” of these products are builders themselves. Therefore, this economy can be regarded as a “closed economy”.
“A closed economy typically refers to a country that does not trade or engage in other financial exchanges with any other country. That means no imports come into the country and no exports leave it.” - Investopedia
This leads to multiple problems that Product Hunt is facing, including low conversion rates for launchers and the abundance of bots on the site. We’ll go into each slice of observations at once.
If you are a founder and are looking for the best ways to launch on Product Hunt, I recommend reading the strategies laid out by the man behind the launch of Shapr3D, Gabor Papp.
Through this article, you can see the impact of a Product Hunt launch and its implications.
1. The secondary market of upvotes
If you have launched on Product Hunt, you must have come across LinkedIn messages like this.
These are so-called promotional partnership messages. Influencers would scrape your data on Product Hunt and cold message you with a proposal. These proposals are often written in good faith, e.g. your product is good, let me share your product, … However, as you engage further, a price would pop up, often in the range of 15$ to 50$.
While I’ve not been rich enough to try such service, I did a bit of due diligence on these offerings. Below is 2 example of products which paid for such partnerships and were met with meh results.
As you can see, there is a community of people which leverage on the impact of upvotes. Upvotes are not bought and sold directly but is shared in a more discrete and indirect way.
In a few instances, I’ve seen builders reported that upvotes affiliated with these services are from fake accounts. There can’t be so many authentic Product Hunt influencers on LinkedIn after all.
2. Upvotes are not equal
The ranking system of Product Hunt depends on upvotes and comments. However, not every upvotes and comments are treated equally. They are assigned different weights based on their givers.
As mentioned in the article by Gabor Papp, there is an urban legend in the Product Hunt community: “You need around 5 followers in PH if you want your vote to be positive”. In fact, this statement can be easily supported if you follow Product Hunt rankings closely.
As Product Hunt change their algorithm quite frequently these days, we don’t often see instances of this anymore. Personally, I’ve seen my products rank higher than others with higher vote counts. But this only occurs for a few hours until my votes are actually higher than them.
Whether you get featured or not is even more mythical. My experience is that:
Votes and comments from veterans on the site count tremendously. This can’t be stressed enough.
Users must be able to try your product. Can be a demo, an interactive website or just a freaking cool landing.
You must be a veteran builder yourself. Launched a few products before and interacted a lot with the community.
3. The power of community
Product Hunt has one of the best communities ever. Here you can find fellow builders and enthusiasts that are incredibly supportive of your products.
As a good Hunter, I always keep track with my brotherhood. Although I don’t often cold message builders myself, I’m most certainly support them when they found me.
“Friends upvotes each other products and don’t release products on the same day. “- The bro code of Product Hunt 🐧
This is one of the best sides of Product Hunt nowadays. Unfortunately, this is also what makes it even closer to becoming a closed economy.
A collapsing economy
North Korea is a closed economy. It doesn’t trade with the outside world. What if the people of North Korea have access to money printers and start spamming wealth?
Well, that will lead to an economic crisis.
If you have read a lot about Product Hunt, you will realize that it has been ridiculed by a lot of its builders for its system. Upvotes no longer matter due to fake accounts and “partnerships”. Rankings no longer matter because Product Hunt’s audience is mainly builders.
While many products have great reception on Product Hunt, it doesn’t lead to any customer. This is because of the fact that Product Hunt is a closed system for builders and investors. You can easily get promoted by your peers, but whether they actually use your products is not a fact. It is as if you ask your mom to download your app.
To solve these issues, many Hunters even built their own platform for sharing products.