

What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice - zoltarSpeaks
http://www.peteroome.com/2014/07/22/what-happened-when-my-startup-was-listed-on-product-hunt.html

======
eps
Page hit count is a vanity metric.

We were featured on PH and while it does indeed drive a lot of traffic, the
quality of it is about the same as from StumbleUpon's paid discovery, i.e.
near zero. They come, they see, they bounce. No conversion _at all_.

~~~
rrhoover
Agreed re: page views.

As Peter pointed out, it really depends on the product. Founders have reported
as little as 0.5% conversion to as high as 40% conversion from page view to
purchase via PH.

~~~
wuliwong
I agree 100%. The author spells out explicitly that you should consider if the
users of Product Hunt are in your demographic. Seems pretty smart, it would be
like advertising a fast food app in a fitness magazine and then being upset
that the conversion rate was low.

I also look at things like PH, HN and Reddit as tests of my product. I had a
post about a new feature make the front page of Hacker News, the product is a
Swift programming resource and I had 8500 views within 5-10 hours. After that,
the shark fin died out and I'm back to nearly where I started. That tells me
that I haven't quite figured it out.

An interesting difference (just observing my own behavior) is that every new
feature I release, I submit to HN. But, I am waiting until a certain point to
submit something to PH. I think it is because of Product Hunt's focus on
Product that makes we want to only show things that are more "ready for
primetime" .

I might be fooling myself, but I feel that the probability of meeting people
interested in joining my cause in one way or another on PH is much higher than
on HN. Obviously, that's just what my brain has decided on its own, no data to
back that up.

------
oonny
what did you mean by "after clearing it with the Product Hunt crew." isn't the
process just submitting your link?

------
fesuffolk
I'd not even heard of product hunt, is it a UK only thing?

~~~
fred_durst
Its basically one of those scene pumping deals. Its seems more common in the
art and music world than tech as far as I can tell. Get together with a group
of people trying to do similar things and then make it look like you are more
popular than you are by acting in concert with each other. For example liking
each others posts, promoting each others projects on social media and in
person. Essentially you give each other a fake buzz to get new things off the
ground, like a head start. Then others from the outside looking in think that
you have created that buzz organically and come to check out what all the
excitement is about.

~~~
patrickbradley
hah, that is a super-negative interpretation of it. It is also a really one-
sided view (only looking at it from the perspective of people who submit
links). The bulk of their users will never submit anything, they just enjoy
reading the posts, trying out the products and giving feedback. I'm not sure
what you see as "fake" about the "buzz"? It isn't like they are bots. They are
actual human beings who might even purchase the service or product.

Another view (a far more accurate view) is that it is a spin-off from Hacker
News with a more focused topic. I quite enjoy the site, and I've never posted
anything on it. Non-technical people and product focused people can find a lot
of the stuff on HN outside of their interests where product hunt hits much
closer to the bullseye, more consistently.

~~~
fred_durst
I'm not saying it to be negative. Its the standard way to get any type of
endevour that needs a network effect(hype) to get off the ground. When
starting a band its really hard to get people to come to your shows and listen
to your music. But if you get together with a group of other like minded bands
and start pumping each other up, it looks like you are already popular and
attracts attention. Standard scene building stuff.

I just wanted to clarify that Product Hunt does not appear to be an
organically created phenomenon, but a very engineered process that from the
looks of things was very well executed.

I could also be completely wrong.

------
A_Pizza_Guy
At this point in time Product Hunt is only really known to a very small
community of people

~~~
tabrischen
Yes, and it's a very niche demographic. I think Pete made a great point about
bearing in mind where the feedback is from.

------
BrianPetro
Thanks for the information. I've been interested in going to the site with
LinkPlug > [http://www.linkplugapp.com](http://www.linkplugapp.com)

~~~
bjones53
Looks similar to [http://snip.ly/](http://snip.ly/).

~~~
BrianPetro
It's very similar. Of course I believe we do some key things differently.

