The power laws of Product Hunt

Success breeds success. On Product Hunt, if you’re #1 or #2 of the day nice and early (especially the #1 spot), you’re guaranteed 1000s more eyeballs will view your product as the day rolls on. Those eyeballs translate into more upvotes, which keeps you at the top, leading to even more eyeballs. Beyond even just the day’s visitors, top spot gets you prime placement in the Product Hunt Newsletter, and exposure to plenty more people and places that might talk about you. All this turns into website visits, which translate into signups, downloads, subscriptions - success. A great launch can bring you 10,000+ visitors to your site! Unfortunately today is not that day for us! Last time we launched a product we had a rollercoaster - on our initial “launch day” our product didn’t get featured on the homepage at all, despite getting over 100 upvotes. We thought that was the end, launch over, but we contacted Product Hunt to ask how the decide what goes on the home page. Turns out they can just stick you on the home page the next day if they like what you’re working on and it wasn’t featured the day before! So that’s what they did. Especially lucky for us, we got to keep all the upvotes we had from the day before! So we started the day with 150 upvotes, and it was just up from there, to becoming the most upvoted product launched that day. We didn’t think about this reality hard enough today, so rather than lining up a few hundred people with the upvote button at their fingertips as the clock struck midnight, we thought it would be fine to just message some friends, and send an email (which you received earlier). We have been proven wrong! Messaging friends is not enough - especially if you’ve not seen them in a long time because you’ve just been grinding, working hard on your startup! A startup doesn’t just have one launch, it has many launches over its lifetime. We’re not giving up on this one yet, but we definitely re-learnt a hard lesson we thought we already knew: Product Hunt launches are power law events - if you want to win at the end of the day, it pays to be winning right from the start. What do you think the right way to deal with this is? How do you feel about the super pragmatists that line everything up to shoot to the top, or even maybe go "acquire" votes elsewhere? Would love to hear your thoughts! On that note: Magicflow launched today, check us out :)