review of the new algorithm, 3 real cases, 24 useful links

Hello everyone, my name is Alex, I am the founder of an AI startup, where I am responsible for marketing and sales. Therefore, I actively monitor interesting promotion channels and share my thoughts.

Today we’ll talk about what kind of results you can realistically expect when launching a project on Product Hunt, whether it’s worth the effort, and how to increase your chances of success in the new conditions.

How it works now

The current Product Hunt algorithm works like this: all products in the first four hours of the day are shown in random order and receive votes. In this case, the vote counter is not visible to users at first. After four hours of such random issuance, a top is formed, ranked by the number of votes that the projects managed to collect. And at this moment the counter is visible to all users.

This was not the case before – before the recent changes, the top was formed immediately, and the success of the launch largely depended on the efforts spent on preparation. If a startup has a community of users who can support it, and the team has a large network and the opportunity to share a link to their launch in thematic groups and chats in Telegram and Slack – such activities made it possible to make a good start and, moreover, to plan activities throughout the day to support pace.

Now it turns out that projects that are in the top after 4 hours are very difficult to remove from there. And not all founders like it – here’s a typical a comment on Twitter about this.

What you can count on: real launch cases

To understand what the results of placement may be, let’s study several real launches on Product Hunt. Let’s start with the m1-project – its team recently published a detailed analysis of your launch on the Indie Hackers resource.

Brief statistics of their launch:

• Upvotes: 246

• Comments: 64

• Product of the Day: #7

• Website visitors: 1500

• Collected emails: 285+

• Sales: 20 clients with an average bill of $75

  

  According to the calculations of the project team, on the day of their launch, in order to get into the top 3 based on the results of four hours of random issuance, it would be enough to receive 150 upvotes. Namely, the top three at the end of four hours looked like this:

  • 1st place: 265

  • 2nd place: 224

  • 3rd place: 125

  To achieve maximum traction, the m1-project team has compiled a list of groups where entrepreneurs ask each other to support launches on Product Hunt. They also found a number of thematic subreddits on Reddit, and also ordered advertising from several influencers on X (formerly Twitter). About the cost – below.

  Here’s another example story about the launch – a product called Fundraising Kit. An important point is that this launch took place before the Product Hunt algorithm changed. Some statistics:

  According to the author, his strategy was simple: collect as many upvotes as possible in the first hour after launch, and then hope for organic growth. As we can see, this approach worked, but for this the founder had to spend time on preparation. It consisted of him looking for online startup communities and meeting other entrepreneurs there, and then asking them to support the startup.

  And finally, in my own experience, our Linguix project has been ranked #1 on Product Hunt three times. Our statistics are as follows:

  

  Our strategy was not to launch on a weekday – as many often advise. The logic is simple – competition is higher on weekdays, while on weekends, when “corporate” marketers are not on payroll, there is a chance to climb higher with fewer upvotes. As a result, this allows you to get more traffic, even if overall there is less of it on the site that day.

What about resource costs?

The m1-project team spent $1000 on the launch, which was spent on paid posts on Twitter:

The founder of Fundraising Kit only spent time – he joined more than a dozen startup communities, published announcements of his project everywhere, and assembled a group of early adopters of more than 300 people. This resource became the main one for the launch.

In our case, we also spent about 1500 for launch preparations. The main thing was preparing content and a publication plan in various startup groups.

useful links

In conclusion, here are a few dozen useful links that can be used to publish launch announcements on Product Hunt:

I hope you liked the article – I will be happy to answer questions in the comments. I also have the pleasure of advising fellow founders on entering Product Hunt and marketing in general in the USA. So write to telegram @alexlashkov or facebook!