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ProductHunt is very gamified. You have to jump through their hoops to do well, reach out to "hunters" (these guys will put this badge on their twitter/linkedin)

ProductHunt is very gamified. You have to jump through their hoops to do well, reach out to "hunters" (these guys will put this badge on their twitter/linkedin) to post for you to get the boost from their following, schedule to launch at the perfect time, spam people to upvote you. People buy bots, PH doesn't care like HN does about voting rings or authenticity. We launched D2 to 629 upvotes on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33704254), and 1.3k on Reddit. I didn't want to fuck with all that ProductHunt checklist stuff and threw it on there and got 9 (https://www.producthunt.com/products/d2 https://www.producthunt.com/products/d2). In hindsight it was probably worth playing their game. It does get a lot of traffic. I just never visit the page because I know how gamified it is.

danielxli 4y ago
Interesting stats on HN vs. Reddit vs. PH!
paulgb 4y ago
I’m curious if there are any “success stories” out there -- anyone who played the game and felt it made a material difference to their success?
- danielxli 4y ago
  Yeah! would love to hear if there are any of these
- alixanderwang 4y ago
  oh i actually did play it a few years back when I launched Terrastruct (company behind D2). It was just a solo-effort bare bones project at the time, but I reached out to a hunter and all that. Got 112 upvotes (https://www.producthunt.com/products/terrastruct https://www.producthunt.com/products/terrastruct), and got a few paid subscriptions from it. It was a material morale boost at a time when I didn't know if anyone would find it worth paying for. We've since grown a lot. In total it was only like $20/mo, but felt like a big success to me at the time. I guess I A/B tested playing the game vs not playing the game, as much as one can.
ayewo 4y ago
I think comparing up votes is not very useful to determine with community had the most impact on your business, but one metric that is common to HN, PH and Reddit is traffic. How much traffic did each of those communities drive to your site when you launched?

danielxli 4y ago

Interesting stats on HN vs. Reddit vs. PH!

paulgb 4y ago

I’m curious if there are any “success stories” out there -- anyone who played the game and felt it made a material difference to their success?

danielxli 4y ago
Yeah! would love to hear if there are any of these
alixanderwang 4y ago
oh i actually did play it a few years back when I launched Terrastruct (company behind D2). It was just a solo-effort bare bones project at the time, but I reached out to a hunter and all that. Got 112 upvotes (https://www.producthunt.com/products/terrastruct https://www.producthunt.com/products/terrastruct), and got a few paid subscriptions from it. It was a material morale boost at a time when I didn't know if anyone would find it worth paying for. We've since grown a lot. In total it was only like $20/mo, but felt like a big success to me at the time. I guess I A/B tested playing the game vs not playing the game, as much as one can.

ayewo 4y ago

I think comparing up votes is not very useful to determine with community had the most impact on your business, but one metric that is common to HN, PH and Reddit is traffic. How much traffic did each of those communities drive to your site when you launched?