Anecdotal data. I released a couple of things on product hunt. Popularity-wise one did will, the other went nowhere. Financially, it was completely the opposite. Boring stuff is very successful. I haven't seen a "popular" product hunt thing that I am willing to pay for in ages!!<p>People pay for pain meds, product hunt featured products are colorful vitamins.
Totally anecdotal / single datapoint: launched my side project in 2018 on Producthunt. Total crickets. 5 upvotes.<p>We are now a 20+ people team, 400+ B2B customers and $12M raised.
> We consider a 2XX (Success) and 3XX (Redirection) status codes successful<p>I feel like this is flawed, especially considering 1/2 of the successful responses were 3XX. It's possible that they had just linked a short URL that was a redirect, but it's also possible that the product was shuttered and a redirect put in place to a replacement product, the company homepage, or even an acquiring company. I don't think there is an easy way to tell based just on the response code, and I'm not sure you could even programmatically determine it unless you had samples of what the pages looked like on launch day (maybe compare today vs the Internet Archive?).
Comments here are really surprising. I really struggle to understand Product Hunt. I've spent multiple sleepless nights scrolling through it and I couldn't find a single meaningful or useful thing. I guess if you start splashing water around the streets, you will find a few perfectly shaped puddle. But I have never stumbled upon anything that made me think "wow, this is awesome" not even "this might be useful".
I have launched on PH last year, ended up 5th product of the day then companies started reaching out asking for demos.<p>I left my job end of that week and been doing it full time for a year now.<p>However, I agree with comments about launches in general. If you have a good network, you can launch rubbish and end up in the top 5.
Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting.<p>The most interesting chart is one of the last: Proportion of Failures over time. As expected, more recent product links are less likely to 404 or 5xx.<p>Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot!<p>More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward.<p>Moreover, this analysis can’t actually account for products that have been shuttered but still have landing pages online. It’s ultra cheap to keep a placeholder “Sorry we’re closed” page online, so I imagine a lot of these projects are shutdown but counted as “success”.<p>Subjectively, this matches what I’ve gathered from watching PH. Getting a PH featured product listing seems to be a badge of honor, but PH users aren’t really interested in using 99% of the products and the submitters aren’t actually interested in building them past proof of concept. Recently, the bulk of postings seem to be advertisements for paid information products or pay-to-join communities.
Funny story: on the day that Product Hunt posted its Show HN, someone (unbeknownst to me) posted my startup on Product Hunt. It was fun to ride a little wave on top of a big wave!<p>My startup is still around, [1] and we posted on PH one or two other times when we launched new products. Even though we had some powerful hunters (thanks to our early presence on the site), I found it took too much time to be worthwhile for follow-on product releases. I'd be interested to know if others have had the same experience, or if they have tips for how to get a meaningful bump out of subsequent posts.<p>1: <a href="https://www.beelinereader.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.beelinereader.com</a>
It would be interesting to see:<p>1. How the online ones are doing financially.<p>2. Which sectors are doing well - what are the trending tools.<p>Skimmed through PH APIs, don't think this is possible. Courtland's Indie Hackers (they have stripe verified revenue) maybe of help - a quick google resulted in this¹ result<p>There's also microconf report on SaaS's²<p>[1] <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-are-making-60-million-in-stripe-verified-arr-bac07f782d" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-are-making-6...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://microconf.com/sois-report-2021" rel="nofollow">https://microconf.com/sois-report-2021</a>
This is interesting data. A “failure over time and cohort” could be an interesting visualization. Similar to the cohort retention tables here: <a href="https://amplitude.com/blog/cohorts-to-improve-your-retention" rel="nofollow">https://amplitude.com/blog/cohorts-to-improve-your-retention</a><p>It makes it easy to see based on when a product was featured whether it’s becoming more or less likely to fail after a given time period.
Interesting, I'd like to see a more comprehensive version of this using <a href="https://builtwith.com/" rel="nofollow">https://builtwith.com/</a> detection data for products where it's relevant.
Slightly related: If you wanna analyze all product hunt posts until july 2021 yourself you can do so here:<p><a href="https://veezoo.com/phdemo" rel="nofollow">https://veezoo.com/phdemo</a><p>Disclaimer: I created that demo
Unrelated to the article - is it just me or is this scrapingbee product borderline nefarious? From the homepage:<p>> <i>Thanks to our large proxy pool, you can bypass rate limiting website, lower the chance to get blocked and hide your bots!</i><p>> <i>Scrapingbee helps us to retrieve information from sites that use very sophisticated mechanism to block unwanted traffic, we were struggling with those sites for some time now and I'm very glad that we found ScrapingBee.</i>
Nice! I've often wondered what proportion survive. Tbh, I've launched about a dozen things on PH and it's not realistic for every product to be a success. You learn by your bruises so I'd be surprised if most founders didn't have a string of failed launches behind them.<p>Interesting to see the categories that had the best responses include no-code!
> there's actually proportionally less failures in Product Hunts busiest period<p>This is a really interesting post! I think there's a little survivorship bias. As Product Hunt grew 2015-2017, users posted old projects of theirs which were already popular and successful.
ProductHunt has become a cess pool of spam and people gaming their voting system to appear as a featured product. Ryan Hoover is too busy with his web3 projects and investments to care.