OpenStatus
Here’s the story of our Product Hunt launch, where we ended up as the second product of the day, along with our thoughts a couple of days later.
The Launch
On Saturday, October 18th, Flo Merian unexpectedly launched our product on Product Hunt without our knowledge.
At 9 AM, the hour of the launch, I received an email congratulating me on the launch and my product.
Initially, I thought it was a broken AI outreach. We had never planned to launch OpenStatus on Product Hunt, but there we were. Unsure of how to react, we decided to embrace the situation and see what happened. Just doing what we do best: YOLO.
Soon after, my LinkedIn inbox filled with outreach messages trying to sell me upvotes.
I read a lot of blog posts about preparing for Product Hunt day and how to achieve a high ranking. However, we followed none of this advice and continued with our day as we have planned it. Though I replied to every comments on the Product Hunt page. Also
Max and I only posted once on our social media about the launch. My post promoting the launch was on super random. But people from our communities were super kind to upvote and comment and shared it. Thanks the OSS community!
By the end of the day, we finished second, behind Claude’s Skills by Anthropic.
The Metrics
As of October 22nd:
- Upvotes: 416
- LinkedIn spam: a lot
- GitHub stars: negligible
- Users: approximately 10
- Paying customers: 0
- Visits: 687
Why Didn’t We Launch Earlier?
When we started OpenStatus, we considered launching for a long time. I told Max, “Let’s do it; it would be good.” However, he was hesitant. We knew we needed to prepare, and we feared disappointment if it didn’t work out. So, we never launched. Also probably knowing our perfect users is
My Opinion: Product Hunt is Dead, Prove me Wrong!
Given the spam I received and the lack of sales, I genuinely don’t believe the ratings I see there. Between the VC-backed tool upvoted by all their friends and investors, and the paid upvotes, the platform seems to be dead.
If you want to buy 100 upvotes, it’s only 40 USD.
Maybe it’s just not the place to launch a dev tool; it’s only an AI tool nowadays, but Vercel launched their products a couple of years ago, and it’s really fun to see their old launch.
I don’t believe spending time on a Product Hunt launch is worthwhile, and it should not be taken seriously as part of your marketing strategy. I'm not even sure we will showcase the ProductHunt badge on our website.
Also, we launched on a Saturday; we did not end up in the newsletter, which could have helped us reach more people.
Product Hunt is Dead, Prove me Wrong!