Day 103: The Price of Product Hunt

marketing

Yesterday, I launched on Product Hunt. I was happy with how it did! (I wasn’t sure if it’d stay on the front page so this was a nice surprise.)

  • It got to #6 with 271 upvotes, 57 comments:

  • It brought (at least) 518 people to the landing page (as with my Hide Feed launch, this number seems surprisingly low — a ratio of 2:1 for visitors to upvotes seems strange. I’m guessing that many people visited with ad/tracker blockers enabled)

  • 176 people installed Intention and 21 people uninstalled it on the same day

Thanks to all my friends who upvoted, commented, shared, and showed support! Deeply appreciate all your help. 🙏🏽

So now my inbox is full of fun bug reports and feature requests, but today, I want to talk about the subjective experience of launching something on Product Hunt. There’s a price to be paid, and no, I’m not talking about paying the randos who email you with the promise of boosting your product with their army of voters:

From the time I launched Hide Feed on Product Hunt.

From the time I launched Hide Feed on Product Hunt.

I’m talking about the personal toll that my current way of launching on Product Hunt entails. Many of the downsides are unique to Product Hunt due to two factors:

  1. All launches go live at midnight PST
  2. Early votes immediately after launch are crucial. By the morning, most products on the front page will have accumulated a ton of votes. If you haven’t made it to the front page by then, it’s quite unlikely that you’ll ever make it there because the ones on the front page will continue to accrue votes from the increased visibility.

Sleep

Since all Product Hunt launches happen at 12AM, I’ll stay up until the product goes live at 12AM, and then start posting everywhere to get traction. I’ll message friends directly to have them check it out, and that means that I end up having lots of conversations with lots of people. I’ll also monitor the product page and respond to the various comments that come in. By the time I’ve posted everywhere and wrapped up all my conversations, it’ll usually be 2 or 3AM. I then go to sleep and wake up before I’m able to get a full night’s rest because my body isn’t used to sleeping that late. This is absolutely no bueno because I become highly dysfunctional when I’m sleep-deprived: My self-control disappears, which leads to binging food or mindlessly browsing the Web, I’m unable to focus, and I become more irritable. I end up feeling like a piece of poop the entire day.

Spamming

As mentioned above, I’ll message friends to check out my Product Hunt launch. Most people I know who successfully launch things on Product Hunt do this, and for a good reason: It works. When you ask for support directly, people respond.

In general, I feel uncomfortable asking people for help or favors. It’s even worse when I’m asking people for impersonal help that has nothing to do with their unique attributes or experiences and has more to do with the fact that they’re a warm, breathing blob with… a Product Hunt account. And to add a cherry on top, the messages have to be sent after midnight (or 3AM if they’re on the East Coast), when they’re likely asleep. This time, I added a bit to let them know that I’m aware of how weird this sort of thing is:

Doing that made me feel a bit better, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m still doing it. If you tell someone that you know it’s not cool to cough in their face but do it anyway, it’s still not cool.

Scattered Attention

On most days, I spend most of my working hours in a focused state where I’m deeply embedded in my work, and I only check my communications periodically. Product Hunt launch days are the complete opposite. I’m constantly switching contexts between Product Hunt, Twitter, Facebook, Messenger, iMessage, Slack, and other channels where someone might have commented or messaged me. Add the fact that I’m a sleep-deprived zombie, and the whole day just feels low-key miserable.

So I have to ask myself: Is it worth it?

Is getting a product to the front page of Product Hunt worth the lack of sleep, spamming my friends, and feeling like a zombie for a whole day?

Nope. Not at all.

Here’s my new plan for launching things on Product Hunt:

  1. Submit my post
  2. At 12AM, post on social media and the communities I’m in about the launch
  3. Go to sleep!!!

This likely means that my Product Hunt launches won’t do as well in the future, and I’m okay with that. It’s funny that I spend so much time thinking about the ways that the incentives behind the technology we use are often harmful to our well-being, and I’ve only just now recognized that this is indeed the case with my Product Hunt launch process as well. Welp, yet another reason to develop an actual marketing plan besides posting on Reddit/Hacker News/Product Hunt and hoping for the best!