TinyLog: Learnings from 170K Product Hunt launches

While we all love TinyLaunch (right?), Product Hunt is obviously still king. According to Semrush, they average 3-6 million visitors a month. I went on a deep dive and analyzed every single product hunt launch since the start of the platform in 2013. Keep reading to learn when to launch for maximum attention or success.

What’s new?

Nothing. Almost. We no longer require product logos to be square, so that’s cool I guess!

Last week’s winners

The following products got the most votes during the past launch week.

🥇 Blood Insight AI – AI-powered personalized blood analysis

🥈 BuBuTales – Tales by cartoons/movies/anime

🥈 Idyll – World's first AI talking Girlfriend/Boyfriend

🥉 Headline Cleaner – Get the News Without the Clickbait

Personal favorite

ChatEDU – The tool I wish I had when I was still in university studying for exams. ChatEDU turns lectures, study notes and homework into dynamic practice questions. Plus, one of the sickest landing pages I’ve ever seen. Looks very promising.

A Product Hunt deep dive

Product Hunt has been around for over 11 years. The volume of monthly launches has been pretty stable for most of this time. But something curious started happening around February of 2024. The number of launches started exploding from 800-1600 a month to 2900-4900 launches a month. A cool 3x-3.5x. If you’ve been feeling like ranking in the top spots on Product Hunt has become more difficult, it’s not just you.

But why is this happening? I think it’s pretty obvious that tools like Cursor and Lovable.dev play a large part in this change. With AI pumping out MVPs left and right, no wonder launching has become more competitive.

If you want to succeed on Product Hunt despite the competition, it’s more important than ever to launch at the right time.

If you have a huge following (or prepared your launch with the Launch Support Tracker for a LONG time 😉), launching on a Tuesday is your best bet to get maximum attention. Of course the likelihood of your launch not being featured and thus being buried among hundreds of other products is extremely high.

I’ve analyzed the exact number of upvotes necessary to place 1st of a Tuesday over time, since the inception of the platform. It seems you should be confident you can get 1000-1400 upvotes for a good shot at 1st place.

If you have a smaller or no audience, and just want to secure one of the top spots, I’d suggest launching on a Saturday, which generally has the lowest number of launches out of all weekdays. Less competition == better chances. 300-350 upvotes give you a good shot at ranking in third place.

For a full breakdown of the votes required to rank 1st-3rd, for every weekday, check out my tweet thread here.

Tweet of the week

Absolute banger by Abel on the topic of luck. I’ve previously touched on the surface area of good luck. This tweet perfectly encapsulates the sentiment.

PS

As always, you can reach me by simply replying to this email or messaging me on 𝕏 @chrissyinspace.