Product Hunt Survivor Bias: My Experience

After months of hard work, feedback, and learning, I launched Curl2Url on Product Hunt. Three months ago, on March 19, 2024, I eagerly submitted Curl2Url to Product Hunt, only to find it missing from the spotlight. Perplexed, I delved deeper, stumbling upon a tab housing all products posted that day, there was Curl2Url, lost at the bottom of the page.

Even so, I would like to thank all the launch supporters.

As a novice to the Product Hunt realm, this marked my inaugural product launch. I diligently absorbed insights from guides like "The Product Hunt Launch Guide" and Marc Lou's "How to Launch a Startup" (Jan. 24th, 2024), the latter securing the accolade of Maker of the Year at the Golden Kitty Awards. However, my immersion in success narratives inadvertently overshadowed other realities. That’s how I fall into the survivor bias.

Guided by the belief that Monday to Thursday are good days if you want to get more traction, I chose Tuesday for Curl2Url's debut. Conversely, Friday to Sunday are your day targets if you want to launch the product just to get the Product Hunt badge. But if you don’t get featured, you barely have traction.

Yet, amidst my immersion in triumph tales, I overlooked reads such as How Product Hunt really works ( Dec. 15th, 2015), How do you get featured on Product Hunt? (Sep. 19th, 2019) alongside insightful Hacker News comments on this post.

Digging deeper into the purported algorithmic nuances dictating featured eligibility, I analyzed featured and non-featured products from April 2024.

Checking out outlier days featured chances, I didn’t see a variable related to being featured or not.

From my point of view, I saw products that needed improvements being featured and good products not being featured. Consequently, while intrigued by the inner workings of the algorithm I don’t want to spend more time checking how it works when the conclusion I extract from it is that it needs to improve.

Conclusions and Future

Last week, I took a fresh holiday that helped me to think about the experience and my future steps.

While the experience thus far has been enriching, my focus moving forward lies in achieving sustainability. Having left my conventional job in January 2023, I have been living from savings. My goal is to find a job that gives me time for my projects, where I can learn from subjects I would like to delve into, with difficult challenges that keep me motivated and give me a good income.

In light of this, I am committed to diversifying my approach and not relying solely on the prospects of a single platform. While Product Hunt holds promise, it is imperative to acknowledge the inherent unpredictability of such endeavors.

I will continue working with Curl2Url for at least until August. It’s useful for me; there are several features I would like to add, and I can always relaunch it on Product Hunt.