I want to share a story that literraly made me cry today🥹

Oleksandr Buratynskyi
14 replies
My name is Oleksandr and i’m bootstrap startup founder. Our launch of version 2.0 was featured and live on June 27th 2024 and thing is - it happened by mistake. We just forgot to reschedule it on a page we prepared for our product. i must say that now i regret that we took it too seriously and spent more than 5 month to prepare all materials. In the same moment product wasn’t yet ready. We spent another 12 hours of waiting to get response from PH support and eventually take down PH launch page itself since our mobile apps were not live on the stores. People loved our concept, i mean Real people and upvoted so much that product was featured and took #5 Product of the day award. But again, there was an old version of our product in Stores After our iOS and Android apps went live we rescheduled it for today (14th Oct 2024). - We changed our tagline and description to offer more clarity to the community. - We put all our soul and Creativity and it’s really frustrating that such unique product didn’t get attention and significant increase in amount of organic traffic from CEE to Product Hunt Just because new algorithm decided we’re not worthy. We’re stuck. We can’t get proper feedback from PH Support. It’s seems to me that it is also automatic and just sending default answers to those who are not featured without properly looking into details. Let me reiterate it Again: in July we had 5th place without any promo Campaigns which i think is great marker 🤗 We were not paying any bot farms to gain traffic. All we have is our fans and people that want to give support for getting this favour back when time comes. I don't want to be rude or harm ones feelings but unfortunately i'm assuming that PH uses algorithm that doesn’t allow to see such things as creativity, stubbornness, human character, hours, mental health loss, body health loss, broken relationships and years invested in search of a concept that will disrupt the world 🤯 And here’s my question: how do you think is it possible to teach algorithms to wage those parameters in order to be featured on such platforms like product hunt? Or nowadays people build algorithms just for the sake of having them?

Replies

André J
There is no algo. The PH team decides which launches to feature. With 4 main criterias (more important criterias first). Innovation / differentiator, creativity, craftsmanship, usefulness. You don't have to have all 4. Sometimes 1 is enough. Then there are many things that will auto-block a launch. I can't go through them all but. Let's just say, play nice and don't create too much trouble for the PH team and you don't have to worry about them. The PH team has a split second to judge each launch everyday. there are 200+++ So don't make them do a lot of work to validate you etc. One thing you can do to hedge against not being featured, is to ask for feedback from the community before you launch. That way we can tell you if there are anything that sticks out. Giving you an opportunity to fix it. But no body asks for feedback. I dunno why. that's what the community is here for.
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Oleksandr Buratynskyi
@sentry_co Insightful! Can you please check our page and say what would be a killer feature for you? or is it missing? https://www.producthunt.com/post...
André J
@sasha_buratynskyi Usually PH is all about "product position". So they feature products that are clearly better or different than the competition. So focusing on the killer feature in your app, is probably better than listing many features. Putting that front and centre, and making the intro super clear. Dropping the usual marketing speak etc.
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André J
@sasha_buratynskyi I think in general travel apps is a hard space to innovate with right now. As it's been commoditised through other technology. Like ChatGPT. I can walk around in Barcelona and talk to ChatGPT about Barcelona in my earphones for free. That's hard to beat. You can make a better experience. But It would be hard. ChatGPT is commoditised many industries and will continue to do so. So in this space. you can't really compete on novelty. You have to win hearts on creativity, craftsmanship and price. So the price must be free in order to build traction. And then you can do partnerships for instance on top of that. Innovation and usefulness will only ever have parity with what is already built into our phones. Or will be very soon with apple intelligence. That's the mindset of the PH team. This is how they think.
Yuliia Pieskova
Very weird situation... I hope they fix it...
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Kate Ramakaieva
FuseBase /formerly Nimbus/
Can’t see any reason for being not-featured. If there is some, you deserve to get explanations 🙏🏻 as well as others makers who spent lots of effort to create product and prepare it for decent launch on PH 🙏🏻
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Valentyna Zakharova
It looks like algorithms work in the way to make you pay. Because there is no any other logical reason not to feature your product
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Oleksandr Buratynskyi
@valentyna_zakharova that’s what i thought. They saw that we have very nice and creative visuals and thought that it was made by large team with a lot of money, so the only option for us they prey were ready to provide is official Advertising banner starting from 5000 USD
Abdal Yousef
Jaeves: Content & Marketing AI Copilot
Jaeves: Content & Marketing AI Copilot
It makes me sad that tTravel is not featured! I shared my thoughts on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/a...
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Oleksandr Buratynskyi
@abdalyousef Really appreciate your thoughts and impact on community. We should make this platform more inclusive
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Oleksandr Buratynskyi
Many of you know me for 6 month already. I was active and sincere within this Community You can find product page here and please tell me if this product worthy enough to be featured? https://www.producthunt.com/post...
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