Watched my friend refresh Product Hunt 200 times on launch day. Is that just how it goes?
My friend launched his tool a few weeks back and texted me at like 7am saying he was already awake refreshing the page. I checked in around noon and he hadn't eaten, hadn't left his desk, just kept switching between the upvote count, the comments, and Twitter mentions on repeat.
At one point the ranking dropped two spots and he called me convinced something had gone wrong, even though the actual upvote count was still going up. I tried telling him the number going down for a second didn't mean much, but it didn't really land in the moment.
What got me was that he barely replied to half the comments people left, because he was too busy watching the count instead of talking to the people leaving it. Told me afterward that the conversations he did have were the part that actually mattered, way more than where he landed on the board, but he only realized that after the day was basically over.
I haven't launched anything myself yet, so I don't know if this is just how day one always goes or if he made it harder on himself than it needed to be.
For people who've actually done this, is the refreshing and spiraling pretty universal, or is there something you did differently that kept you sane?
And for anyone else who hasn't launched yet either, does hearing this make you more nervous about your own launch day, or does knowing it happens to almost everyone take some of the pressure off?
Replies
One suggestion would be to have a teammate keep an eye on the rankings while the founder focuses on answering comments and talking to users.
@mahender_ram absolutely! that's how things should be. A two person team, at the least, would make a lot of difference.
@terranicgerald
Product idea - PH launch day page Auto refresher :P,
sends nudges on upvote or comment milestones.
Potential 1000 customers per day :). Build it !!
@roopesh_donde Ha, honestly not a bad idea. Though there's something a little funny about building a tool whose whole purpose is to remove the temptation to check a page manually, when checking that page is the exact behavior a launch is trying to encourage in other people. Might end up being more useful as a "here's what actually changed since you last looked" digest than a refresher though, since the anxiety part wasn't really about lacking updates, it was about not trusting that no update meant nothing was wrong.
the teammate advice is good but useless if you're solo, which a lot of people here are. so the version that works alone: decide beforehand what you're actually there for.
if it's the number, you'll refresh all day and feel bad no matter where you land, because the ranking moves for reasons that have nothing to do with you. if it's the conversations, you have an actual job to do, and it happens to be the part that pays off later. your friend figured that out by evening. you can just decide it in the morning instead.
practical version, and this is what i'm doing for mine: close the ranking tab. keep the comments tab open. answer everything.
haven't done my ph day yet, mine's coming up, but i've been through the app store review version of this and the spiral is identical. the fix was the same, stop watching the thing you can't influence.
the part nobody mentions is that the ranking is basically noise by day 3 but the comments thread doesn't disappear. it's the one part of launch day that people still find months later through search, and it's the part that actually shapes whether someone trusts the product enough to try it, long after the leaderboard stopped mattering to anyone but the founder. so weirdly the thing your friend was neglecting was the thing with the longer shelf life