Day 102: The Product Hunt Riddle

marketing

Holy balls, I’m tired. Going to keep today’s post short and go to sleep super early (body, please stay asleep) so that I can be a new man tomorrow.

I launched Intention on Product Hunt last night, and despite this being the 7th product I’ve posted, I finally developed a mental model of how Product Hunt works.

Before last night, I thought Product Hunt worked like Hacker News and Reddit:

  • You post something
  • If people like it, they upvote it
  • If enough people upvote it, it automatically climbs the rankings to the front page for more visibility

Sweet naivete.

I finished putting together a bunch of assets for Intention (logo, images, etc.) at 12:30 AM and wondered whether to post for today (4/16) or wait until tomorrow. Would waiting another day and tweaking the assets more make a difference? I thought “what the hell” and clicked the “Launch now” button. I posted the link on Twitter, Facebook, messaging threads, and hoped that enough people would be awake to prevent Intention from dying in obscurity.

Some upvotes started rolling in, but… I couldn’t find my post anywhere. I clicked on “Show X more” on the bottom of today’s submissions, but it wasn’t there. Huh, strange.

I went to the list of my submissions on my profile, but it wasn’t there either. What was going on?

On the post itself, I clicked on the link to monitor my launch stats:

Yay, people were upvoting and commenting, but… what was that in the corner? “0 minutes left”?

I got a sinking feeling. Did I somehow post on the wrong day? Maybe my post had gotten bucketed with all of yesterday’s submissions. I checked the timestamp for my submission but it showed up as having posted today, not yesterday. Also, none of my older submissions had the “Monitor your launch stats” bar so it looked like my post was active for today.

So why wasn’t it showing up on the front page or in my profile?

Looking at my profile again, I discovered that the submission was buried at the bottom of all of my other submissions. This was weird because the rest of my submission were ordered from newest to oldest, so it’d make sense that Intention would be on top.

I went back to the front page. I counted 10 different products with fewer upvotes than Intention. Shouldn’t Intention be showing up then?

I started messaging friends asking them if they knew anyone at Product Hunt because at this point, I was convinced that I had encountered a bug. I also messaged the Product Hunt support team directly through the chat widget on the site, but I got a message that everyone was away:

I had dun goofed. I felt really bummed out because I had put a lot of effort into preparing all the assets and announcing the Product Hunt launch everywhere, but it looked like it had all been for naught.

And then I got a response on the chat widget:

A ray of hope! Someone from the PH team was available!

I messaged them back:

I crossed my fingers and because I was grateful he was around, I sent a thank you as well:

And then I waited.

I chatted with some friends and with newfound optimism, continued sharing the Product Hunt post. Finally, I got a response:

Wait. What?

I refreshed the front page, and there Intention was:

In that moment, I realized two things:

  • My existing mental model of how Product Hunt worked had been completely wrong
  • Everything on Product Hunt is heavily curated by the PH team

When I had submitted my very first product to Product Hunt, I had wondered why it did so poorly when it had done quite well on Hacker News. I thought maybe I had just gotten unlucky with my timing.

In reality, I just hadn’t been chosen. All submissions start out destined to die, and the moderation team selects the chosen few that have a chance at making it. That’s what it meant to be “featured”. John Calvin had been right: Free will was an illusion and our fates were determined by predestination, with Product Hunt moderators being the arbiters of divine judgment. I don’t know why it took me so long to figure this out, but when it clicked, it felt like I had learned a dirty secret. Even if you made an incredible product, if no one on the moderation team thought so, your submission was toast. Not quite the meritocracy I thought it was.

To be fair to the Product Hunt team, I don’t know how they came to design the ranking system this way. Maybe there was too much voting fraud going on and so they decided that everything should be vetted by real human beings. Maybe they had tried a bunch of different systems and found that this one produced the best experience. Or maybe I’m reading too much into this and I’m completely wrong about how all of this works. Who knows? And besides, all it took was a nice message to the team to get my product featured.

To be clear, I don’t have a problem with how this works: It’s totally within the Product Hunt team’s right to curate the experience they provide on their site however they wish. The disappointment comes from the mismatch with how Product Hunt appears to work, assuming I’m right about this. When I read a magazine or a newspaper, I know that everything is curated by the editorial team, and that’s totally fine because everyone knows that. It would be much better if Product Hunt wrote in their guides that all submissions go through a human curation process where their team vets submissions for quality, but perhaps they think people would spend too much time trying to find and befriend moderators for preferential treatment if they knew that’s how things actually worked. The opaqueness of the selection criteria and lack of transparency about how products are featured are what made learning about this process a bummer.

So much for a short post! Okay, I’m exhausted so good night~