How we screwed things up on Product Hunt and the #1 rule you need to follow to avoid it

Being on Product Hunt front page is a huge deal for startups, especially for those with a SaaS product. You can get tons of visibility, helpful feedback from its community and sometimes even some early adopters.

We knew that, and that’s why we spent weeks getting

Oh boy were we wrong.

The big day arrived and we didn’t make it to “Popular”. And the worst part is that it was completely our fault.

Get some popcorn.

Watch out where you’re posting your PH link. If your mother-in-law and your neighbour want to help, they can doom you.

Just to give you a bit of context, we’re four young Spanish entrepreneurs who left their steady jobs and took a chance on their own. As naive as it sounds, we wanted to create something that could help small but fierce teams like ours to beat the big, old-school enterprises in their own game.

We got the charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent to build such a tool — but you know what we didn’t have? Yeah, money.

So, in order to have cash to re-invest in Crammut, we have to build apps and design websites. Bootstrapping is not easy, and that’s why we receive a lot of support from our friends and family. They are aware of the huge effort we’re making to build up our business and they are always trying to help us even with little gestures such as bringing us dinner to the office, sharing posts… or signing up on Product Hunt to upvote our product.

And that was our downfall.

When we shared the PH link on our personal social network, it was kind of a milestone proof for us. We wanted to share our excitement with our people because after all the previous feedback we got from other colleagues and companies, this was the grand debut of our baby. And of course, some family and friends clicked on the link we shared, assumed it was some kind of popularity contest and upvote us. And that’s cool, right? What could be the harm in having a supportive family and friends?

Well, the Product Hunt algorithm banned us from being featured. Boom, in our faces.

In the beginning, checking our upvotes was almost hilarious: “LOL Edgar your mother has upvoted us!”, “Oh Sergio, we’ve just received an upvote from your boyfriend, so cute!”, “Oh look! Two upvotes from our coworking mates! Awesome!”. Then we realized that some products with fewer upvotes were being featured, and we weren’t. WTF.

When we checked our friends and family profiles, everything came clear — Those were profiles created that exact day with only one upvote: Crammut. The kind of profiles PH hates because they are considered spammy upvoters. How could we’ve been so dumb!? At that moment we knew Crammut wasn’t going to be on the front page. And we felt like crap, honestly.

We’re not blaming our families and friends, of course not. They just wanted to help. We’re not blaming Product Hunt either. Their algorithm is what makes the community trustful and unique. We blame ourselves because we could have been more cautious about it.

So this is our learning: It’s okay to share your Product Hunt launching with your people, but keep it to the tech-community the first day. Make sure your first upvotes are coming from the Product Hunt community and be an active user as well! Upvote other products months before your launch, invest some time using the tools and give positive feedback to the makers, you’ll thank that when you become a maker yourself.

Don’t let excitement ruin your launching campaign. You can share your results after the PH launching with your muggle friends. It’s a less risky way to celebrate your milestones.

And now our bonus learning. Find a hunter!

Actually, this is something we read and discussed long before our launching: Should we reach a hunter? Should we post our product ourselves?

Some friends with successful launchings on PH told us the same — It doesn’t really matter. They got similar results with and without a hunter. So we decided to hunt Crammut by ourselves and have more control over the posting time.

After our launch, our conclusion is that the Product Hunt algorithm doesn’t give a fuck about who the hunter is, however, a hunter’s network can leverage the launching, as his/her network looks less spammy to PH. Keep in mind that PH can easily detect through social media if you and that person that just upvote you or left a comment are somehow related.

Well, this is our story. Mama failure is always teaching us lessons and we wanted to share this one with you guys. I hope you’ll be luckier than us! And if you want to have a great launch, check this post. I wish we would have found it before!