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Royce Branning

Does asking your user base to support your launch backfire?

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We shared out our launch with user community on Thursday and saw a ton of support come in. Unfortunately, it seems many of them were first time product hunt users, so they were supporting us with brand new accounts. We ended up with the most upvotes of the day by a pretty significant margin (~200) but placed 3rd. I know PH is hush hush about the algorithm but I'm sure I read somewhere or another that "older" accounts get more heavily factored into the upvoting algorithm. Wondering if anyone else in the community has insights here?

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Fabien Snauwaert
The official guide does recommend to invite people to join PH early and not just on the day of the launch.
nuric
@royce_branning1 This is a great question ❔I recall that being the case with your product launch. PH inherently has a linear scale (the votes) to build upon which presumably encourages people to get as many upvotes as possible. Though they discourage asking for upvotes, I'm sure there are bad players. During our launch yesterday, we got at least 3 emails offering services to boost upvotes for a fee, one even promised top 3 or no fee 👩‍💻 I wouldn't be surprised if there is some weighting, a behind the scenes algorithm to make the platform usable. But that is a double edged sword because what happens if you can gather a lot of supporters like in your case. It's difficult to distinguish the two scenarios, if anything, those people offering a upvote for fee service would have older accounts that have been active than your new PH supporters!
David Cagigas
Interesting. Following this to read all discussion.