How to cheat at Product Hunt .. and get away with it.
Product Hunt — for the uninitiated — is a masterclass in feedback loops.
A simple but hugely popular website, within the “Early Adopter” tech community, Product Hunt lists ~10–20 new projects each day and lets its users try, comment, review and — crucially — vote for their favourite product of the day.
Like all democracies, it’s fraught with lobbying and corruption.
This article is not just about ProductHunt. If you’re not a techie you can still read it because, deep down, it’s also just about life… and how to win.
Product Hunt can take small bedroom projects from obscurity and propel them into the public sphere. It can also be a phenomenal springboard for commercial projects — bringing early users, keen to help form nascent products, within close proximity to founders and their teams.
I should be clear: I love Product Hunt, I love the challenge and I recognise that they work super-hard to protect everyone from mischief.
However: as someone who is about to launch their fifth product in earnest — their third in three days, no less — I felt it was time to share some of my learnings.
Feedback loops and why they matter.
A feedback loop is where the success of something now impacts its success in the future. They’re everywhere. Evolution is a feedback loop.
But when they’re designed into systems that effect us they can be quite damaging. We’ve all been at a wedding where the microphone picks up the sound from the speakers. It’s not a nice sound.
Things that rank other things so often include feedback loops. Product Hunt is no different.
Each day, thousands of people check Product Hunt — or receive a notification or email from them.
But here’s the catch: when you go to the Product Hunt page, the projects with the most votes are top. When you receive their daily email, the projects with the most votes get featured.
Why is this a feedback loop? Because the projects with the most votes get shown to the most people… and therefore have the greatest chance of being seen and voted for… accelerating their position away from the projects below them.
Therefore, the first lesson of Product Hunt is that you absolutely need to be top from the get-go… or you’re nowhere and sinking fast.
It’s a tough game.
How to cheat.
Product Hunt switches to a new list at 00:00 PST (or 7am here in the UK).
A new list. Everyone starts at 0 votes.
So how do you win?
There’s little or no doubt that those first 10–20 minutes, from midnight, are the most crucial. You have to do everything within your power to get to the top fast. If you do so, you secure your chances of staying there.
So, for most people, that means having folk ready and waiting to vote for your project — as if they just happened to be online at weird-o’clock — when the starting-gun goes off.
But hang on? These are newly discovered projects aren’t they? How or why would they garner lots of support right at the begging?
Well — there are a few tricks, of course.
- Preparation.
- Hunters.
- Sweat Shops.
- Luck.
- Product Market Fit
Let’s look at these one by one…
1. Preparation
Every other “How to win at Product Hunt” article you ever read (and for the non-techies: “How to win at [life/sales/marriage/etc]”) will tell you that preparation is everything.
They’re not wrong.
If you’re going to make your mark in those first few minutes you need to have the support of all of your friends, family, early-adopters and their cousins.
It can be difficult for most people because 00:01 PST is an odd time… but there’s no doubt that getting your existing audience gee’d up makes a big difference… and in a way, that’s how it should be: If you genuinely have an audience of enthusiasts then that should be reflected in the rankings — up to a point. That seems appropriate.
For some of our launches we’ve tried super-hard at this. We’ve used Product Hunt’s own subscription product “Ship” which helps you collect people before you launch and email them on the day. It’s a great place to get started and, if nothing else, holds you to account because you can literally see how many signed-up Product Hunters you have on your list before you hit “Go!”.
Like all things in life though: you reap what you sow. Sow plenty of seeds.
2. Hunters
You don’t have to list (“Hunt”) your own product. Anyone can hunt any product. When that happens, everyone who follows the hunter gets a notification.
So the next think is, being hunted by someone who’s followed by lots of other people on the platform makes a huge difference. It’s no different to Stephen Fry or Elon Musk tweeting the name of your restaurant. Fame delivers impact.
We’ve tried with and without a “Hunter”.
For two of our recent launches — twiDAQ and NewsDeck — I hunted on my own (I have ~600 mostly dormant followers). They gathered an average of ~100 votes each.
For three of our launches — Charlie, OneSub & Nüz — we were lucky enough to find a Product Hunt user with a huge (35,000) strong following who posted our products. The results were very different for the first two (Charlie reached #3 on the day it launched). Nüz launches tomorrow so I’ll tell you how that goes when I know!
There’s no doubt that when someone else, with an established following, “Hunts” your product you’ll find your launch day goes better.
But there’s a big, double-ended caveat to this — which I will come to later in more detail.
3. Sweat Shops
One of the lovely things about launching on Product Hunt is how many random strangers reach out to you on launch day.
I’m half not kidding. Genuinely nice, honest, enthusiastic people from across the world do actually reach out to you (on Twitter in my case) to congratulate you, give you feedback or just let you know they have your back. This makes it all worthwhile on its own.
But you also get some strange emails, texts, IMs and pigeons from people you’ve never met, offering to “boost” your listing, for a small fee, with no risk that you’ll get caught.
Now I can’t actually tell you if it’s worth engaging with these people because I never have but I have to believe that some people do… otherwise why would they bother?
If you’re still reading at this point I have to say: please don’t.
4. Luck
Of course luck plays a part. Remember: you’re in a race with an un-predictable number of runners who’s form is kept completely obscured at all times.
Some days you are in the field on your own. Some times it’s crowded. At the weekend there are few visitors so you have a better chance of being first but you might be seen by a fraction of the people who might see your product on a week day. Some days your competitors are well prepared, some days you’re all amateurs running neck and neck.
All I would say is don’t judge your success too closely. Don’t ever congratulate yourself too much. Don’t be too hard on yourself either.
Luck always played a part.
5. Product Market Fit
I don’t think this gets talked about enough on articles like this: Some products don’t suit Product Hunt. Some really do.
In case you weren’t aware, my products are mostly about making the news better. (twiDAQ’s not — it’s a twitter stock market game!?)
One of the things I’ve learned is that, while I most definitely do fit the profile of the average Product Hunt visitor, my products don’t.
Tools for techies do well. Paid things with free offers do well. Little quirky side projects made by techies for techies do well.
Broad-audience products like ours, designed to appeal to anyone (and no-one) and which don’t have a quirk do not, in my experience, do well.
Charlie, interestingly, did very well because it’s quirky. It’s a chatbot that talks with you about the news! What’s not to like. It’s quick to understand and super-engaging.
twiDAQ is way too complicated a proposition, OneSub too.. and NewsDeck has a particular, journalistic niche. They were never going to do brilliantly.
You really have to know your audience — and judge your success on your product-market-fit, not just on your aspirations to take over the world.
How to get away with it.
So how do you really cheat… and how do you get away with it?
Well, you’re not going to like the answer… but really, the best way to cheat is to change the rules of the game to one at which you can win.
I am not going to advocate paying for sweatshop votes. Nor am I ever going to do it however much it might irk me to think that I’m the only one not gaming the system. It goes against every fibre in my body and I will not enjoy wining at a game that I didn’t win honestly.
I will, however, revel in winning at a game when everyone else in the race was distracted by the wrong finish line.
Why are you even on Product Hunt?
Someone asked me for some Product Hunt advice recently… and the best thing I could say, in a rush, was that at best it’s like most things in life:
A reflection of your trajectory, not a means of changing it.
So what are you actually trying to achieve? Are you really after that “Product of the Day” badge or is there something else going on underneath the desire to win a virtually un-winnable race against folk you’ll never meet?
As I said earlier, one of Product Hunt’s great values is that it puts founders and early-adopters together in a forum that encourages honesty, feedback, collaboration and constructive observation.
That, really, is why you should be listing your products on Product Hunt.
If you think it’s going to take you from obscurity to popularity then you’re not only kidding yourself but you’re also missing the point. Of course it might — and ranking well does give you lots more engagement — but if you approach it like this you’re effectively just buying your project a lottery ticket and courting disappointment.
If, however, you approach a Product Hunt launch as an experiment, an excuse to engage, to validate, to discuss and to learn — I promise you, you will not be disappointed, even if you only get a dozen votes.
Who’s Hunting me anyway?
The same has to be said with engaging with a “Hunter”. You probably think you’re engaging with a hunter because you think that it will improve your chances of ranking highly. It might.
But again: whether you do or don’t see a benefit from the follower-count of whomsoever posts your product on the site, if that’s all you’re thinking about you’re missing the point.
Your hunters know more about getting your product, its messaging and its market fit right than most anyone you’ll ever meet.
I’ve had a couple of chats now with the chap who’s been kind enough to post a few of our products and I’ve learned more about my products — and myself — in those chats and received more value than all of the actual launches put together.
If you approach your hunter as some kind of ranking elixir you may find, again, that you’re very disappointed if they don’t have the impact you’d hoped for. But if you approach that relationship as an opportunity to learn from someone who’s seen it all before, from a thousand different angles, then you will never be disappointed, wherever you rank.
Cheating & getting away with it.
So how do you cheat and win? You change the rules!
I’m so sorry if you thought I was going to tell you how to get to “Product of the Day” because I’m not. That’s not the lesson here.
The lesson here is that getting to the top of the pile is a distraction.
Learning the most you possibly can… that’s the race you need to be running… and once you realise that you’ll be way out in front of everyone else. You just can’t lose.
Launch your product on Product Hunt.
Engage a great Hunter.
Tell all your friends.
Chase the top spot.
Play the game.
But remember always that the goal is not to get to P1 — that’s a red herring.
The goal is to get to know thyself, get to know your product, get to know your audience and work out how to improve for a better future.
Keep winning.
