Did we cheat on Product Hunt?

This is not another “how to do well on Product Hunt” post. There are loads of those you can Google for yourself.

This post is to tell you what we did not do: cheat.

On Wednesday we launched IdentityRAG on Product Hunt — a barely concealed attempt to jump on the GenAI bandwagon, by building an integration for Tilores, our super-duper identity resolution technology for unifying scattered customer data (wow!), with LangChain — the leading Large Language Model (LLM) framework (ooh!).

Wow + ooh = wowooh = Product Hunt success = profit? That was the equation we were banking on to take us to the moon.

Turns out people quite like the idea. More people than we expected. As a result we finished 3rd for the day, which for a data infrastructure company is quite some feat and certainly surpassed our expectations.

What these Product Hunt “how to” posts don’t seem to mention, is that when you launch on Product Hunt, you will receive dozens of messages on LinkedIn offering you access to “influencers’ audiences” with guarantees of between 50 and 300 upvotes.

I have to admit, I was tempted. My assumption was that everyone is buying upvotes, and that by not doing so I was, once again, being naïvely honest and would therefore lose.

We got off to a decent start when the launch opened, and I just could not bring myself to break my annoyingly rigid moral code.

However, what was interesting was to watch all the other companies launching at the same time using Hunted.Space to see companies that looked like they had bought votes.

Naughty pink line. We are the honest yellow line.

The company that got off to a roaring start was gathering upvotes at a rate we could never match. But then suddenly they lost nearly 200 upvotes. It seems Product Hunt actually does detect bot/bought votes.

Looking at the chart for the day, you can also see when it seems like the company in the orange line must have decided to buy some votes, then immediately got them all wiped, shortly after pink line lost their 200.

At about the midway point, all of us lost a few upvotes. I presume that is because the people who contact us all, also upvote all the live launches and at some point their votes get cancelled. So even if you don’t buy upvotes, you will still lose some upvotes throughout the day.

What was especially funny, is that one of the vote sellers contacted us to tell us he could guarantee we would get #1 for the day, and quoted other companies he had worked with, including one of the companies we were currently competing against. I did question whether he would be able to get both of us to #1…

So kids — if you are doing a Product Hunt launch — don’t cheat. Don’t buy upvotes. It is not necessary. All you have to do is shamelessly whore yourself out to every single person you know including friends, immediate Scottish family, extended Venezuelan family, acquaintances, school networks, emotional support groups etc.

That is all you need to do to get you to the lofty heights of #3. I don’t know how you get to #2 or #1. That is a different article. Maybe you just need to buy votes. Meh.