This mistake cost me the #1 on Product Hunt

A few weeks ago I launched getSuperflow.co on Product Hunt.

It got 405 upvotes and reach #5 Product of the Day! 🎉

Here’s the story of the mistake that (probably) cost me 1st place.

Like everything, it began with an idea.

I’m a busy indie maker & freelancer.

I had made +10 websites on Webflow for my clients the past months.

I thought it could be interesting to repurpose those websites into separate components that I could copy/paste into my next projects.

Of course, I had to make a product out of it. I knew that a library of well-designed components would help a lot of Webflow developers.

I built the library in a month and started marketing it on Twitter with freebies.

Each day before launch day I would propose to my audience of +2000 followers a new component to copy/paste for free.

The goal was to gain visibility and let everyone know about the upcoming PH launch.

It was my 7th launch on PH, still stressful but I was pretty confident.

The product is useful, there’s a market for it - I just needed the Webflow community to be aware of its existence.

And came launch day

You probably heard like me that sharing a direct link to your launch page is less efficient than if your upvotes come from PH’s homepage.

Product Hunt would decrease the value of votes from people arriving directly on the product page.

Technique tested and not approved on my part.

Last time I did that, I lost a lot of traffic and upvotes because of it.

So I was decided to go with the direct link option and get as much upvotes and interactions as I could.

Thinking this would make the difference.

I drafted a neatly tweet to announce the launch:

And also sent an email announcing it to 2500+ subscribers on my mailing list.

Huge deal as I’m often scared to trigger this channel!

How did it go?

As you can assume, not as planned…

Tweet had a fair amount of interactions, likes and shares.

I even got positive replies to my email.

(thank you to the amazing support 🙏🏽)

But the upvote number wouldn’t grow as fast as I would’ve liked.

2 hours after the launch I realized I shared the wrong link!

Instead of sharing the link to my "launch page" where the CTA is to upvote the product, I shared the link to my "product page" where the CTA is to follow the product.

Product Hunt recently introduced this distinction and I hadn't paid attention to it 😩

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It's always when you think you prepared everything that you make that one silly mistake...

Couldn’t afford to send an ERRATUM email and the launch tweet had already too much traction to delete and repost it.

So I kept on going hoping it wouldn’t be that bad.

After all, it wasn’t that bad

Superflow ended up #5 product of the day (after a few hours at the #1 spot!).

Definitely not my best launch but the product gained a lot of exposure and that's what matters most.

Funny thing is: I got more followers than upvotes.

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But that's a good thing in the end.

It means that if I ever want to launch new features for Superflow, followers will be notified and the product will get more visibility (or at least I hope so!)

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I hope this post has been helpful to you!

Want to support me? You can follow me on Twitter, I’m much active there 😉

And may the odds ever be in your favor if you’re planning a Product Hunt launch 🍀

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