Honestly launched this past Monday and we ended up Top 4 with 350+ upvotes and 40+ comments. It doesn t feel real, because:
1. The support we received from hundreds of strangers across the internet was incredible, and we are beyond grateful for it.
2. We didn t plan this launch. At all.
We ve been so deep in building the product that we kept pushing our launch back again and again and again. All of a sudden, on Monday we woke up to dozens of Congrats on the launch! messages. In our pre-coffee, foggy brained states we were really confused as to why. But then it hit us: we forgot to change our launch date.
To make matters worse, we didn t have any of the essentials: No hunter, no maker comment, no demo video (added in midday). There was just a placeholder of v0 materials we already iterated upon internally countless times. Our logo was even outdated, and the link to our product and website was nowhere to be found in the comments. Not one upvote or comment came from anyone we knew within the first hours of launching.
Because our day wasn t crazy enough, the website broke, so most businesses couldn t fill out our interest form properly, and our consumer facing Chrome extension encountered a huge bug where users couldn t use our product after installing it.
A situation like this usually means guaranteed failure, yet to our surprise, we climbed to a Top 5 position on the leaderboard and were swarmed with PH notifications all day. Even outside of Product Hunt we were being battered with notifications.
We re extremely thankful for the outcome, especially considering the circumstances. This is not a scenario that happens often, but it proved something vital to us:
Even with a shell of a launch, we re making something people want.
We always believed finding real, trustworthy reviews online mattered. But this experience made it clear it s not just important, it s necessary. As AI-generated content continues to blur the line between real and fake, the need for verified, authentic opinions is clear. That s the mission we re pursuing with Honestly.
Product Hunt
Honestly
@curiouskitty The kitty is always coming in with the big questions! The specific part of the PDP journey failing today is the point after a shopper reads all descriptions and reviews on the page. Once a shopper clicks "Add to Cart" and realizes the next step is to spend their money, they hesitate and find external validation from real people on social media who aren't paid to speak on a product.
By bringing the reviews shoppers already look for to every PDP, consumers can use this information to make a very simple purchase decision instead of getting lost in the noise of the internet. Furthermore,
We're partnering with various Shopify brands at the moment to give the exact numbers on how effective this is, and are already seeing very promising results. Super excited to demonstrate how using Honestly can significantly reduce cart abandonment very soon!
Congrats on the launch guys! Congrats @scott_davidson_jr
Once the tool aggregates all the discussions, what formats can we extract this data in? Is there a way to export these insights to share with the broader team, or does it all live inside the dashboard for now?
Honestly
@byalexai Thanks so much Aleksandar! As a consumer, at the moment there is no data to extract/export - it's just an ability to see all the reviews from social media relevant to the product page being viewed.
As for brands that are interested in getting the review data, that is something we provide in a dashboard catered to what product features, trends, or categories of reviews each brand is interested in to increase website conversion rates.
minimalist phone: creating folders
How this tool can identify the "realness"? What are the parameters for identifying what is justified review?
Honestly
@busmark_w_nika We do our best to filter our any posts that have sponsored content in them, AI generated content, and/or fake content. There are many people who review farm and those are easy to spot, and our sponsored content detection is getting better as we build larger datasets and have better transcription on videos.
There will absolutely be content that makes it through our filters, maybe we can add a "report as sponsored/fake" button on each review card.
What do you think of us not hiding all this content, but rather tagging it properly and allowing you to filter it?
minimalist phone: creating folders
@honestly tagging is better than censorship ;) people should have the whole spectrum of information available so they can orientate better :)
How do you decide which real reviews from Reddit or TikTok to prioritize or filter first; like recent ones, most upvoted, or from verified buyers, to cut through noise fastest?
Honestly
@swati_paliwal Right now we have an internal algorithm that determines content authority using the likes, comments, creator and more variables. This is only getting better with time!
What we want to eventually get to is not creating one ranking for all, but rather having "good for X / bad for Y" style ranking. For example, if you're a runner in Finland, you're looking at this shoe for a different reason than a runner in LA. What might matter is a review that speaks about the waterproofing, the durability in cold weather, etc..
I think you should try to do a more elaborate platform built in your website just like https://reppit.ai for example, currently it look more like a Service Agency website than a chrome extension tool it's a little bit weird.
Honestly
@vesper_city Great point, we are creating a site that caters to both Chrome extension users as well as Shopify stores since we are currently developing a Shopify app as well. The goal is to allow both the average shopper and brands bring transparent reviews from social media into the shopping experience. That's helpful feedback as we continue to improve our site!
Honestly
@vesper_city 100%, might even make a separate landing page for the consumer chrome extension to reduce confusion.
Reddit and YouTube reviews are genuinely the most useful signal when buying something. Sponsored content is noise but someone spending 20 minutes testing a product on YouTube usually catches the real issues. Does it pull the actual text/timestamps or just surface the video links?
Honestly
@mykola_kondratiuk 100% agree. These days online shoppers trust a stranger on Reddit or YouTube much more than any review a brand's review site or on platforms like Trustpilot. In terms of how we pull the videos in, we retrieve the actual comment, post, or video so that it can be viewed on the page. Specifically for the videos, we also have time stamps attached to parts of the transcript relevant to the product being reviewed.
This way, the shopper never needs to leave the website!
People already check Reddit or YouTube before buying. The part I’m curious about is what happens right after install. Right now the value depends on the user remembering to click and check. If that first moment isn’t obvious, a lot of people might install it and never actually use it enough to feel the benefit.
Honestly
@arun_tamang 100%. We're currently a floating widget on product pages and we're working on making it easier to 'spot' as some people who download the extension tell us they can't find it. We'll push an update to this as soon as we get more data on what works best.
@honestly How're you thinking about the moment when someone actually decides to check it? Is it something you’re trying to trigger based on behavior or relying on the user to remember it?
Honestly
@honestly @arun_tamang Great questions! Rather than a specific behavior, the extension can detect when it is on a product page and appears automatically in that way. We are currently doing a bunch of testing with what positioning, color, and formatting is best so that it is always extremely simple for a user to click the extension.