The Roller Coaster Launch on Product Hunt!!

#producthunt #linkedin #firstpost #javascript

Hi All, I am a Sr. Developer working on a mission to create ecosystem of tools with Careerflow.ai to help people in their careers especially the job seekers.

Working towards the same goal I created a chrome extension to which I got way above expected response. The extension was liked and rated highly by the users. Later it got featured on the chrome store and we followed all the right practices in development. Here is the link - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/careerflows-linkedin-opti/iadokddofjgcgjpjlfhngclhpmaelnli.

After good response, we got confident about our product and then we decided to launch our product on product hunt today. Here is the URL to the listing:-
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/careerflow-linkedin-optimization-tool.

We launched Careerflow's LinkedIn Optimization tool on Product Hunt on 20th Dec 2022 night at 12.01AM. The next 24 hours, we have been starting our screens and trying to push our rankings by saying Upvote us, Support us, Review us etc. wherever we could reach.

Here's a run-down of the night and day after launching on PH:-

⌛ Within the first hour, another product which released had 5X the amount of "upvotes" (the social currency on PH) than everyone else, obviously they were using bots / buying upvotes.

🏆 However, within the first two hours we were still hovering between #2 and #3 after the bot-driven company. The whole team worked hard to reach out to various product hunt community members we were in touch with, let our friends know about the launch, etc etc.

🚗 While I slept through the next couple hours ( ☕ only takes you so far), the rest of the team continued the outreach, and communication with various hunters.

🌅 As I woke up, we were at #4, however we noticed an interesting phenomenon. The now, #1 product was the previous #2 product, and the rankings kept changing minute by minute.... (There's some interesting behind the scenes drama that I'll save for another day)

🚨 By around noon, the PH team woke up and deleted a bunch of spam upvotes on the previous #1 and #2 products, but they were still far ahead of the rest. I was afraid that we will end up at #5 looking at the increasing votes rate of current number #5.

📈 Now it was my turn to take over and let all my friends, family, and community members know about the launch. We received tons of support from folks sharing in their various communities, groups, etc. And we jumped back to #3!

🥉 Towards the end we tried to get ourselves to the #2 rank and our supporters did really well, but with only a few votes difference, we still made it to number #3.

🎉 Although we were number #3 but we still are very happy to have the prestigious honor of being #3 on the product of the day list and we received a badge to embed as well.

The positive take away from the launch were:-

Initial votes make a lot of difference, the first ranked product is naturally voted more by people, so ask your team to join product hunt so when the launch happens, you already have an initial vote count.
Even the first launch could win the product of the day.
A company and product on a positive mission is genuinely appreciated by the community.
The "Cool" products are naturally liked more and the product hunt team pushed out notifications and tweets about them (clearly a bias).
The graph below clearly shows anything could happen till end hour.