Elsie Ramsey

We recently learned that getting a clean HTTP 200 response doesn't mean your database actually saved the changes.

In our setup, missing security rules and webhook edge cases caused multiple user updates to fail quietly without leaving a single trace in the logs. We had to change our approach and start reading back saved records or checking affected row counts to verify every write.

I joined Product Hunt in September, so it has been a little over a month. I was looking for a place to be active when launching products in English-speaking markets, and while I knew the name, I had never actually used it.

I have bought over 200 products on AppSumo, and some of them showed their Product Hunt ranking. That's how I knew of it.

For the past month I've been watching the products that launch here and the people who are active in the forums. From what I can see, there are a few ways to make a launch go well:

One interesting finding from our database is that the number of competitors appearing in AI answers does not determine a brand's share of voice.

In one category with 1,868 named brands, a single brand held 21% share of voice. Meanwhile, two brands competing against fewer than 400 held under 8%.