11 ms·

Are Product Hunt's featured products still online today?

199 points by daolf 5y ago

ec109685 5y ago
This is interesting data. A “failure over time and cohort” could be an interesting visualization. Similar to the cohort retention tables here: https://amplitude.com/blog/cohorts-to-improve-your-retention https://amplitude.com/blog/cohorts-to-improve-your-retention 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.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. 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. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward. 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”. 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.
- imilk 5y ago
  > Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. Sure, but it's no different than any other blog post from a company. And framing it that way is quite disingenuous since the post pretty much only sticks to the topic and doesn't overtly promote their product.
- daolf 5y ago
  I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts. But anyway, I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not. And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd need to tag much more than 150 pages to have a significant statistical result.
  - runnerup 5y ago
    For what it's worth, you could watch how quickly the confidence intervals converge as you sample the data, to see if it's worth continuing or if the variance is too high and whether you'd have to check thousands of pages by hand: from scipy.stats import binomtest chance_of_dead_page = binomtest(landing_page_counter["dead"], landing_page_counter["total"]).proportion_ci(confidence_level=0.90) print(f'Chance of a dead but existing landing page (90% Confidence Interval):{chance_of_dead_page.low * 100:.2f}% to {chance_of_dead_page.high * 100:.2f}%')
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair. I added it because the content was valuable but HN can be finicky about blog posts from companies advertising their own products. Trying to get ahead of indignant dismissals.
    - halpert 5y ago
      Where do they promote the product? It looks like they’re using a random http library.
    - dewey 5y ago
      > It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair. There's so many blog posts posted here that could fall under "content marketing" umbrella if you want to be strict. I feel like there's no problem with that if the content is valuable and people like/upvote it. After all this is a platform that is doing marketing for YC where YC companies are supposed to post their content too. That "warning" also stuck out to me as a bit unfair as I was even looking for how it hooks into ScrapingBee (as I was curious how these scraping-aaS platforms interface with custom code) and couldn't find anything.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! Is that a lot? I would have been less surprised if it were 1/3rd of links still live.
  - brimble 5y ago
    I thought the same thing until I realized that dead domains are often snapped up by squatters/spammers (or just by other people who want that domain for actual reasons) so may not error when requested.
- martin_a 5y ago
  > More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward. This would very well fit a "fail fast" attitude with testing MVPs, wouldn't it? At least that's what I would guess. Got a great start with PH but didn't move on from there, so the domain was not renewed...
  - city41 5y ago
    Does a great start on PH mean very much? The chances your target audience is there for most products seems very low. I would love to see this data compared to all products/startups in general, but of course that's probably difficult to do.
    - granshaw 5y ago
      Bingo. IME Producthunt is lazy marketing for indie founders. Their main user base is other founders, wannabe founders and super tech literate power users who are itching to use “the next new beta thing”, who’ll be a tiny percentage of any userbase. Granted there are cases where that market IS aligned with your product, eg if you built a low cost site-builder or low cost social media publishing platform
- zaarn 5y ago
  Don't forget cases where a product's domain expired and has since be reused for something else entirely (or a product with similar goal but new vendor)
- agentdrtran 5y ago
  I would love a PH where you have to show off an actual product (instead of blogspam guides, design resources, etc, even though these can be useful)
- polote 5y ago
  > Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. Yeah we have all seen it is on scrapingBee, no need for a warning.
- paxys 5y ago
  The most surprising thing to me is not the failures but that the devs won't even pay a few bucks a year to keep the domains online. If I spent time and effort into building a product that went viral and got a bunch of users, I'd at least leave the front page of it up indefinitely as some sort of tombstone.
- sasquatch69 5y ago
  Fair warning: this response is an advertisement for ycombinator
- itronitron 5y ago
  That's a lot of incredible journeys that have reached their end.
PatrolX 5y ago
Interesting, I'd like to see a more comprehensive version of this using https://builtwith.com/ https://builtwith.com/ detection data for products where it's relevant.
- elkos 5y ago
  Many people use a blog platform for their main info site and a different setup on the actual product isn't that right?
lanecwagner 5y ago
Huh, I never thought about that. I mean, I'm literally launching today (Qvault) I hope I'll be around in a year!
tillvz 5y ago
Slightly related: If you wanna analyze all product hunt posts until july 2021 yourself you can do so here: https://veezoo.com/phdemo https://veezoo.com/phdemo Disclaimer: I created that demo
Pete-Codes 5y ago
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. Interesting to see the categories that had the best responses include no-code!
- criddell 5y ago
  How many of those dozen things are still up an running?
71a54xd 5y ago
My favorite un-ironic ProductHunt product was an app that would let you map where you cried. Absolutely nutty. I miss peak product hunt :(
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
  ProductHunt was simply a way for bootcamp graduates to express themselves during the frontend JS hype cycle of 2014-2018
trenning 5y ago
The no-code trend taking off during the later half of 2020 is really interesting. Something I haven't payed too much attention too yet.
BlewisJS 5y ago
Unrelated to the article - is it just me or is this scrapingbee product borderline nefarious? From the homepage: > Thanks to our large proxy pool, you can bypass rate limiting website, lower the chance to get blocked and hide your bots! > 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.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  No more nefarious than the measures websites put up to avoid scrapers? This just rehashes the Linkedin vs Hiq case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn (not a user, but I do some amount of scraping through other means)
  - brimble 5y ago
    It is definitely super annoying that companies are allowed to spy on us and do all kinds of crazy things with our data, all using computers and automation and "bots" and such, but individuals are increasingly not allowed to use automation to help us out online. Seems rather one-sided. On the other hand, I get that abuse is a huge problem. I do wish at least bots operating at roughly human request rates & daily total requests were considered OK and universally allowed without risk of blocks or other difficulties leading to increased maintenance costs (so, making them less valuable).
    - samwillis 5y ago
      I believe whenever the “no automation/scraping/bots” clause in Ts&Cs has been test in court they have never held up. However that’s not to say a service can’t just cancel your account if you are found to be using one. Running a site thats had a bot get stuck in a loop and suddenly x10000 times the request rate, when they go wrong it’s super annoying for the website owner. We ultimately just banned the whole AWS ip ranges.
    - bydlocoder 5y ago
roansh 5y ago
It would be interesting to see: 1. How the online ones are doing financially. 2. Which sectors are doing well - what are the trending tools. 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 There's also microconf report on SaaS's² [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-are-making-60-million-in-stripe-verified-arr-bac07f782d https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-are-making-6... [2] https://microconf.com/sois-report-2021 https://microconf.com/sois-report-2021
- daolf 5y ago
  Revenue would be near impossible to do, however we could have analyzed traffic using SimilarWeb or Ahrefs API. We could also have analyzed the sitemap to check the last update date. Those articles are really fun to write (I haven't written this one, I'm just the editor), but at some point you have to stop otherwise you end with a 20k words essay.
  - roansh 5y ago
    Agreed. A subset of products are "stripe verified" on Indie Hackers - should be a good enough population. I think the parent article is interesting, thanks for your contributions. I am not saying that the same should have contained revenue, performance data - just that it would be interesting to see :)
jonathan-adly 5y ago
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!! People pay for pain meds, product hunt featured products are colorful vitamins.
- ihaveajob 5y ago
  Would you mind sharing the links? This is at the same time fascinating and total common sense, so I'd like to learn more.
- vyrotek 5y ago
  It's a little like competing over the store check-out aisle shelves. It's unlikely it has what you actually need but there might be sometime shiny or tasty. And if you do want more next time you'll probably go shop around instead.
superfrogged 5y ago
don't worry about it
magicjosh 5y ago
I just realized Product Hunt is a "top of the funnel" function for AngelList. Huh!
- pl0x 5y ago
  The founder uses it as a funnel for his personal investments as well.
ianwootten 5y ago
Hi all, post author here. Just to say this was a really interesting piece to work on - I had a lot of fun poring through the data.
jastr 5y ago
> there's actually proportionally less failures in Product Hunts busiest period 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.
- ianwootten 5y ago
  Glad you enjoyed the post - I hadn't considered this.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    My guess would be that URLs for the categories eliminated after that period (eg. Books and Podcasts) are more likely to remain stable and available, even if the product was a flop.
jedberg 5y ago
> We consider a 2XX (Success) and 3XX (Redirection) status codes successful 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?).
- ianwootten 5y ago
  Or that it even redirects to 4xx or 5xx. I had considered this, but decided to draw the line here.
- richardfey 5y ago
  Won't parked domains be all 2XX? But those are hardly "alive"
  - jedberg 5y ago
    Indeed, another flaw in the system. But I think the article at least calls out that there may be leading pages for dead apps that are still live.
gnicholas 5y ago
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! 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. 1: https://www.beelinereader.com https://www.beelinereader.com
pl0x 5y ago
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.
tnolet 5y ago
Totally anecdotal / single datapoint: launched my side project in 2018 on Producthunt. Total crickets. 5 upvotes. We are now a 20+ people team, 400+ B2B customers and $12M raised.
- nullspace 5y ago
  And we are one of those 400+ B2B customers. Didn't know you were just 20+ people! Really, really solid product. Checkly is a very core part of our infrastucture.
  - elkos 5y ago
    Checkly right? Looks pretty interesting.
  - tnolet 5y ago
    Thanks, that means a lot!
- tiffanyh 5y ago
  > “$12M raised” Why is that even a metric to speak about? Shouldn't the metric that matters most be # of customers, how engaged they are with using the product and ultimately sales? Bringing up how much you have raised seems like the priorities are misaligned.
  - nxmnxm99 5y ago
    Because if I have $100m more than you, it's quite easy for me to get more, higher engaged customers than you
  - lethologica 5y ago
    Oh don’t act like it’s not an important number. We don’t live in a utopia where money doesn’t matter. It’s an important number.
    - andrewxdiamond 5y ago
axegon_ 5y ago
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".
- wingworks 5y ago
  When they first started a few years ago I used to visit them quite a bit, and often found interesting things, but most (all?) that I actually used ended up being discontinued a year or so later. I don't visit the site really every anymore, but I did take a week the other week, and like you, nothing really stood out to me.
- zthething 5y ago
  how about those awesome feature updates from giant tech cos...those weren't helpful?
Oras 5y ago
I have launched on PH last year, ended up 5th product of the day then companies started reaching out asking for demos. I left my job end of that week and been doing it full time for a year now. 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.
beforedo 5y ago
gw67 5y ago
This is a great example of Content PR.

199 points by daolf 5y ago

This is interesting data. A “failure over time and cohort” could be an interesting visualization. Similar to the cohort retention tables here: https://amplitude.com/blog/cohorts-to-improve-your-retention https://amplitude.com/blog/cohorts-to-improve-your-retention 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.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. 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. Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward. 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”. 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.

imilk 5y ago
> Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. The data is still interesting. Sure, but it's no different than any other blog post from a company. And framing it that way is quite disingenuous since the post pretty much only sticks to the topic and doesn't overtly promote their product.
daolf 5y ago
I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product and only 2 internal links toward other educational posts. But anyway, I thought about taking a random sample of pages who returns a "200". Let's say 150, and manually tagging them to find if they're "dead" or not. And then reuse the "dead or alive but a 200" ratio for all the pages but I was afraid that I'd need to tag much more than 150 pages to have a significant statistical result.
- runnerup 5y ago
  For what it's worth, you could watch how quickly the confidence intervals converge as you sample the data, to see if it's worth continuing or if the variance is too high and whether you'd have to check thousands of pages by hand: from scipy.stats import binomtest chance_of_dead_page = binomtest(landing_page_counter["dead"], landing_page_counter["total"]).proportion_ci(confidence_level=0.90) print(f'Chance of a dead but existing landing page (90% Confidence Interval):{chance_of_dead_page.low * 100:.2f}% to {chance_of_dead_page.high * 100:.2f}%')
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > I find your warning a bit unfair as there are literally no CTA inside the blog content promoting our product It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair. I added it because the content was valuable but HN can be finicky about blog posts from companies advertising their own products. Trying to get ahead of indignant dismissals.
  - halpert 5y ago
    Where do they promote the product? It looks like they’re using a random http library.
  - dewey 5y ago
    > It’s obviously blog content designed to promote your product, hosted on the company’s product website. I don’t see how the FYI is unfair. There's so many blog posts posted here that could fall under "content marketing" umbrella if you want to be strict. I feel like there's no problem with that if the content is valuable and people like/upvote it. After all this is a platform that is doing marketing for YC where YC companies are supposed to post their content too. That "warning" also stuck out to me as a bit unfair as I was even looking for how it hooks into ScrapingBee (as I was curious how these scraping-aaS platforms interface with custom code) and couldn't find anything.
nicoburns 5y ago
> Going back to 2014, almost 1/3 of the featured links give a 4xx or a 5xx response. That’s a lot! Is that a lot? I would have been less surprised if it were 1/3rd of links still live.
- brimble 5y ago
  I thought the same thing until I realized that dead domains are often snapped up by squatters/spammers (or just by other people who want that domain for actual reasons) so may not error when requested.
martin_a 5y ago
> More surprising, links as recent as 2020 show a 1/4 failure rate. Those projects basically launched on PH, then shut down shortly afterward. This would very well fit a "fail fast" attitude with testing MVPs, wouldn't it? At least that's what I would guess. Got a great start with PH but didn't move on from there, so the domain was not renewed...
- city41 5y ago
  Does a great start on PH mean very much? The chances your target audience is there for most products seems very low. I would love to see this data compared to all products/startups in general, but of course that's probably difficult to do.
  - granshaw 5y ago
    Bingo. IME Producthunt is lazy marketing for indie founders. Their main user base is other founders, wannabe founders and super tech literate power users who are itching to use “the next new beta thing”, who’ll be a tiny percentage of any userbase. Granted there are cases where that market IS aligned with your product, eg if you built a low cost site-builder or low cost social media publishing platform
zaarn 5y ago
Don't forget cases where a product's domain expired and has since be reused for something else entirely (or a product with similar goal but new vendor)
agentdrtran 5y ago
I would love a PH where you have to show off an actual product (instead of blogspam guides, design resources, etc, even though these can be useful)
polote 5y ago
> Fair warning: This is a blog post advertisement for ScrapingBee. Yeah we have all seen it is on scrapingBee, no need for a warning.
paxys 5y ago
The most surprising thing to me is not the failures but that the devs won't even pay a few bucks a year to keep the domains online. If I spent time and effort into building a product that went viral and got a bunch of users, I'd at least leave the front page of it up indefinitely as some sort of tombstone.
sasquatch69 5y ago
Fair warning: this response is an advertisement for ycombinator
itronitron 5y ago
That's a lot of incredible journeys that have reached their end.

PatrolX 5y ago

Interesting, I'd like to see a more comprehensive version of this using https://builtwith.com/ https://builtwith.com/ detection data for products where it's relevant.

elkos 5y ago
Many people use a blog platform for their main info site and a different setup on the actual product isn't that right?

lanecwagner 5y ago

Huh, I never thought about that. I mean, I'm literally launching today (Qvault) I hope I'll be around in a year!

tillvz 5y ago

Slightly related: If you wanna analyze all product hunt posts until july 2021 yourself you can do so here: https://veezoo.com/phdemo https://veezoo.com/phdemo Disclaimer: I created that demo

Pete-Codes 5y ago

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. Interesting to see the categories that had the best responses include no-code!

criddell 5y ago
How many of those dozen things are still up an running?

71a54xd 5y ago

My favorite un-ironic ProductHunt product was an app that would let you map where you cried. Absolutely nutty. I miss peak product hunt :(

sydthrowaway 5y ago
ProductHunt was simply a way for bootcamp graduates to express themselves during the frontend JS hype cycle of 2014-2018

trenning 5y ago

The no-code trend taking off during the later half of 2020 is really interesting. Something I haven't payed too much attention too yet.

BlewisJS 5y ago

Unrelated to the article - is it just me or is this scrapingbee product borderline nefarious? From the homepage: > Thanks to our large proxy pool, you can bypass rate limiting website, lower the chance to get blocked and hide your bots! > 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.

stickfigure 5y ago
No more nefarious than the measures websites put up to avoid scrapers? This just rehashes the Linkedin vs Hiq case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn (not a user, but I do some amount of scraping through other means)
- brimble 5y ago
  It is definitely super annoying that companies are allowed to spy on us and do all kinds of crazy things with our data, all using computers and automation and "bots" and such, but individuals are increasingly not allowed to use automation to help us out online. Seems rather one-sided. On the other hand, I get that abuse is a huge problem. I do wish at least bots operating at roughly human request rates & daily total requests were considered OK and universally allowed without risk of blocks or other difficulties leading to increased maintenance costs (so, making them less valuable).
  - samwillis 5y ago
    I believe whenever the “no automation/scraping/bots” clause in Ts&Cs has been test in court they have never held up. However that’s not to say a service can’t just cancel your account if you are found to be using one. Running a site thats had a bot get stuck in a loop and suddenly x10000 times the request rate, when they go wrong it’s super annoying for the website owner. We ultimately just banned the whole AWS ip ranges.
  - bydlocoder 5y ago

roansh 5y ago

It would be interesting to see: 1. How the online ones are doing financially. 2. Which sectors are doing well - what are the trending tools. 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 There's also microconf report on SaaS's² [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-are-making-60-million-in-stripe-verified-arr-bac07f782d https://www.indiehackers.com/post/indie-hackers-are-making-6... [2] https://microconf.com/sois-report-2021 https://microconf.com/sois-report-2021

daolf 5y ago
Revenue would be near impossible to do, however we could have analyzed traffic using SimilarWeb or Ahrefs API. We could also have analyzed the sitemap to check the last update date. Those articles are really fun to write (I haven't written this one, I'm just the editor), but at some point you have to stop otherwise you end with a 20k words essay.
- roansh 5y ago
  Agreed. A subset of products are "stripe verified" on Indie Hackers - should be a good enough population. I think the parent article is interesting, thanks for your contributions. I am not saying that the same should have contained revenue, performance data - just that it would be interesting to see :)

jonathan-adly 5y ago

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!! People pay for pain meds, product hunt featured products are colorful vitamins.

ihaveajob 5y ago
Would you mind sharing the links? This is at the same time fascinating and total common sense, so I'd like to learn more.
vyrotek 5y ago
It's a little like competing over the store check-out aisle shelves. It's unlikely it has what you actually need but there might be sometime shiny or tasty. And if you do want more next time you'll probably go shop around instead.

superfrogged 5y ago

don't worry about it

magicjosh 5y ago

I just realized Product Hunt is a "top of the funnel" function for AngelList. Huh!

pl0x 5y ago
The founder uses it as a funnel for his personal investments as well.

ianwootten 5y ago

Hi all, post author here. Just to say this was a really interesting piece to work on - I had a lot of fun poring through the data.

jastr 5y ago

> there's actually proportionally less failures in Product Hunts busiest period 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.

ianwootten 5y ago
Glad you enjoyed the post - I hadn't considered this.
- webmaven 5y ago
  My guess would be that URLs for the categories eliminated after that period (eg. Books and Podcasts) are more likely to remain stable and available, even if the product was a flop.

jedberg 5y ago

> We consider a 2XX (Success) and 3XX (Redirection) status codes successful 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?).

ianwootten 5y ago
Or that it even redirects to 4xx or 5xx. I had considered this, but decided to draw the line here.
richardfey 5y ago
Won't parked domains be all 2XX? But those are hardly "alive"
- jedberg 5y ago
  Indeed, another flaw in the system. But I think the article at least calls out that there may be leading pages for dead apps that are still live.

gnicholas 5y ago

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! 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. 1: https://www.beelinereader.com https://www.beelinereader.com

pl0x 5y ago

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.

tnolet 5y ago

Totally anecdotal / single datapoint: launched my side project in 2018 on Producthunt. Total crickets. 5 upvotes. We are now a 20+ people team, 400+ B2B customers and $12M raised.

nullspace 5y ago
And we are one of those 400+ B2B customers. Didn't know you were just 20+ people! Really, really solid product. Checkly is a very core part of our infrastucture.
- elkos 5y ago
  Checkly right? Looks pretty interesting.
- tnolet 5y ago
  Thanks, that means a lot!
tiffanyh 5y ago
> “$12M raised” Why is that even a metric to speak about? Shouldn't the metric that matters most be # of customers, how engaged they are with using the product and ultimately sales? Bringing up how much you have raised seems like the priorities are misaligned.
- nxmnxm99 5y ago
  Because if I have $100m more than you, it's quite easy for me to get more, higher engaged customers than you
- lethologica 5y ago
  Oh don’t act like it’s not an important number. We don’t live in a utopia where money doesn’t matter. It’s an important number.
  - andrewxdiamond 5y ago

axegon_ 5y ago

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".

wingworks 5y ago
When they first started a few years ago I used to visit them quite a bit, and often found interesting things, but most (all?) that I actually used ended up being discontinued a year or so later. I don't visit the site really every anymore, but I did take a week the other week, and like you, nothing really stood out to me.
zthething 5y ago
how about those awesome feature updates from giant tech cos...those weren't helpful?

Oras 5y ago

I have launched on PH last year, ended up 5th product of the day then companies started reaching out asking for demos. I left my job end of that week and been doing it full time for a year now. 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.

beforedo 5y ago

gw67 5y ago

This is a great example of Content PR.