How We Got Featured Top 10 on Product Hunt: Real Progress & Luck

Oooh, my goodness. Yesterday, Gumdrop was featured top 10 on Product Hunt homepage. (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/gumdrop) My team didn't even know that was happening until I clicked our PH link. Surprise! None of us expected that. Today let me talk a bit about what we did to be featured.

We didn't do anything that was traditionally recommended in the startup community. In fact, I didn't even know we had a PH page until it was already launched. When I heard about it I didn't care about it at all. The last time I messed around with PH was for Pubb.at, my previous startup. I read all these articles and blogs on "how to successfully launch on PH", and did it all. You can still see that crap on my PH account. 10 upvotes, it didn't work!

But here is what we did:

• One day at about 8 pm, my co-founder pressed launch bottom. (dont pay attention to the time, he just randomly launched it)
• We later found out you're supposed to launch at midnight to get a full 24h to collect upvotes. Oops!
• The next day I upvoted it myself. 4 upvotes, not bad.
• But then the NEXT day I saw the upvote counts were going nuts! We had over 60!
• By next morning we had over 120! Whats going on? It turns out we were being featured on PH homepage.

Yeah, that's it. We did it.

Gumdrop has two things that Pubb.at didn't have:

• Nice pictures
• A bit of luck

I can't tell you for sure if the pictures were the key to getting featured, but I think they make you look more legit.

At this point, I can only say: Focus more on the product, focus less on how to get short cuts. It took me a lot of times when I tried to do those "how to successfully launch on PH" tips.

Surprisingly, we are getting a lot of users, but they're not coming from PH. We get most of our users by doing humble, in-person outreach. Passing out flyers, talking to college clubs, etc. But a good PH definitely makes us look more legit!

When real progress meets luck, good things can happen.