Honestly? Way more than I was expecting. Finishing the day at #33 means I landed just 22 spots below the last app on the front page of the day’s top 11 — a huge visibility slot.
For reference, the app that closed out the last featured spot in that day’s launch archive had 78 votes, landing at #22. That’s also a great slot — it shows up as featured in the day’s searches. That’s my next target.
I don’t remember anymore where I first heard about Product Hunt — probably some newsletter or podcast. But for whatever reason, it always sat in the back of my mind whenever I thought about building an indie app. Somehow it earned Top of Mind in my mind. Fact is, ever since I started building Unfurl — back in the early prototypes — I had it in my head to launch on Product Hunt, if only I could get past the technical problems that threatened to sink the project (but that’s a story for another time).
When the App Store approved Unfurl v2.0 — which brought massive usability improvements and simplified how I deal with contaminated tracked links — I was itching to tell people about the app beyond my immediate circle of friends. This version, by the way, only came together because of two friends and beta testers: Carlão, who back in the beta noticed a permission the app was asking for without needing it and kept nagging me until I stripped it out — Unfurl is a little more private because of him — and Zhorn, who thanks to his out-of-date Mac caught the compatibility bug with older versions of macOS that I would have never found on my own. Thanks, guys.
The sequence of events went like this: the App Store approved v2.0 on Wednesday, July 17. From the moment I got the approval notification, I couldn’t get it out of my head that I needed to tell people how cool, simple, and necessary Unfurl is. On Thursday, I found some time and put up a LinkedIn post. Its reach was way above what I usually get there — mostly reposts of Arbeit Studio marketing material averaging 50 impressions each.
By late Thursday afternoon, impressions were closing in on 400. That got me pumped for the Product Hunt launch. So that Thursday night I set everything up: created the launch, wrote the promo copy, picked the images I’d use, and even queued up a LinkedIn post and one for the Arbeit Discord server, where we have a few friends besides the team. It was only much later, close to bedtime, that it hit me: a Product Hunt day starts at 4am in Curitiba time (UTC-3, same as São Paulo). I’ll admit I got a little deflated in that moment, because I knew I’d have far less time to promote the app — there was no way I could get up at that hour, I needed to be rested for work and the routine with my 3-year-old daughter, and there was nobody to share anything with at that hour anyway.
Anyway, as soon as I woke up around 7am — 3 hours into launch day — the first thing I did was grab my phone while still in bed, trying not to wake anyone, to see what had happened while I slept. To my surprise, I already had 2 upvotes! From David Firouzbakht and Ryan, the creators of AirJump (thanks for the personal touch!). Through the morning I posted the message I had ready in Discord, and around 10am I posted on LinkedIn, tying the app-reveal story from the day before to the launch. The rest of the day was watching LinkedIn impressions climb satisfyingly, and posting — almost to the point of being annoying — in Discord, begging my friends to engage with the launch. And I can tell you: all the pestering was worth it.
What I learned from this experience
Every vote counts
People’s engagement is really powerful, and every vote makes a real difference. With just 10 votes and 10 comments, we hit a position I consider genuinely impressive — after all, hundreds of products launch on a single day. That shows the power of each little bit of support. With every new vote the ranking jumped noticeably — more than once, a single vote pushed the app almost 10 spots up.
I didn’t write down the exact rankings through the day (lesson for next launch), so I’m going from memory in ranges: in the morning with the first votes I was down around #60. One vote mid-morning and I’d climbed to the #50s. After the LinkedIn post caught on, a handful of people came in together and the app jumped to the #40s (yeah, I linked LinkedIn from Product Hunt, and apparently they track post activity through the utm_* params in the URL — the irony…). And every vote that landed from there on pushed the app three, four, five spots at a time. When it hit #33, it was the kind of number I kept refreshing the page just to see again. Watching this happen almost live was what made me understand, in practice, the weight of every bit of support — and got me even more excited to share and ask for votes.
And it wasn’t just numbers going up. In the comments, people were describing the app in their own words, and that was worth more than any promo copy I could write. Eduardo, for example, said the difference for him was sending a short Amazon link and the person on the other side actually seeing what it was, instead of a soup of URL parameters. Nobody had to explain “tracking parameters” to him — the problem already bothered him in practice, and Unfurl simply solved it.
But not every vote request can beat the second thing I noticed while looking back on my first launch.
Timing
To really compete for the day’s spotlight, good promo material isn’t enough — you have to pair it with a solid distribution strategy and real ways to engage an audience. It’s no wonder I got several offers from tech influencers to promote Unfurl to their bases of thousands of followers each — the demand exists to the point where it’s a market. Another sign: on the day’s most-featured products, I noticed genuinely organic engagement — some commented that they had seen the product on another specialized site; others, out of curiosity, asked about the approach used to solve some specific problem. Those products obviously already had a bigger internet presence before the Product Hunt launch — which certainly helps the reach. I even asked to have Unfurl featured on ADT, a podcast I love, but the timing was off: it’s only going to happen (if it happens) a week or two after the launch. If the boost comes, that’s still a good thing — but not as much as it would have been on launch day.
It happened. Thanks to the ADT crew for the boost! I was proud to see the topic turn into a cool conversation on the episode.
By this point, you’ve probably noticed this piece took forever to come together. Hi, this is me: too many interests, too little time.
Time zone
Product Hunt’s daily ranking starts at 4am here in Curitiba because of the time zone. That gives other places plenty of time to promote their products before my day “actually starts” — and time for other places to promote after “the end of my day”, like the United States, which is 4 to 7 hours behind my time zone. So any attempt at generating organic engagement has to happen at scale. Whoever “starts the day earlier” becomes the target for whoever comes later.
Of course I know it’s the same 24 hours for everyone, so in theory the time-zone difference shouldn’t matter — but in practice, and psychologically, it does. The simple fact that different places are more engaged than others already dismantles that theory: you can’t compare Curitiba with San Francisco when the subject is fostering new technologies, just to cite the most obvious example — but I’m sure that on the eastern side of the globe there are also cities with a pulsing culture of innovation. Psychologically, it’s really stressful to think that you’re going to sleep and everything might have changed by the time you wake up.
The best comment of the day
In the middle of all this vote-hunting, I asked Thalita — my partner — to comment on the launch. She agreed on the spot but froze: she didn’t know what to write, worried about saying something silly about something that isn’t her thing. I told her not to worry about making Unfurl look good — that I’d take honesty over any forced compliment. What she wrote ended up being the best comment of the entire launch: as a veterinarian, she doesn’t understand anything about tracking parameters, but she said the app does exactly what it promises without getting in the way of her routine — to the point where she keeps forgetting it’s there. And that’s the whole point. For an app designed to be invisible, there’s no bigger compliment than being forgotten. Especially coming from the person who holds down the routine — our 3-year-old daughter, the rough nights — while I’m off building these things.
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But hey, that’s what experience is for, right? — to reduce suffering. That’s why I decided to write this piece. It’s my attempt to concretize a little of my first indie product launch experience and help solidify the lessons for the next launches.