Oops! We Didn’t Even Know we were on Product Hunt

The unforgivable startup sin!

Someone posted ProjectionHub on Product Hunt 10 days ago and we didn’t even realize until today (10 days later).

The Product Hunt audience is the perfect audience for ProjectionHub – we help startups create and share financial projections with potential investors or lenders – so Product Hunt is our exact target audience.  But we totally missed it!

Learn from our Mistakes

So this is basically what happened.  I was just reviewing our Google Analytics traffic and saw this:

So I looked a bit closer at that little bump and noticed the traffic came from Product Hunt.

I thought that seemed strange because we never submitted ProjectionHub to Product Hunt, but sure enough it was there.  So I looked a bit closer and noticed that this kind soul had submitted ProjectionHub to Product Hunt about 10 days earlier.

So in case you are not aware, the way Product Hunt works is that when your product gets submitted it goes to the “Upcoming” page.

So once you are on the Upcoming page you need to start a conversation with the community and encourage genuine feedback.  Product Hunt has an algorithm that helps them determine which products should make it to the Featured Page.

The featured page is where Product Hunt could change the trajectory of your startup.  You could get thousands or tens of thousands of new visits and signups if your product is successful.

Stuck on the Upcoming Page

Unfortunately by the time that I realized that we were on Product Hunt it was too late to really have a chance to be moved to the featured page.

So if this happened to you, what can you do?

Ask for a 2nd Chance

According to the Product Hunt FAQ page you can actually ask for a second chance in the future:

So… here at ProjectionHub we are going to keep our heads down, keep trying to build an awesome product and prepare for our second chance someday, and maybe next time we will hit it big on Product Hunt!