Back in July, I launched my website builder on Product Hunt, it was a really good launch, we got almost 1000 upvotes, but out of nowhere a rival appeared with more upvotes and won. I investigated their marketing, they had no viral posts on the internet, nothing. I could barely find any organic content. Only paid marketing stuff. Most of their upvoters all looked the same, and I could see a pattern, I reached out to Product Hunt, but I heard no response. I spent weeks preparing for this launch. I was very upset. Not because I lost, but because it was an unfair loss, which was clear to me, and even later PH staff replied privately to me that they knew those were fake votes, but ...
Yesterday I launched Index Rusher. We were on top for half of the day and all of a sudden exact same thing started happening. A tool appeared out of nowhere and we dropped to be 2nd.
But this time I had a plan on how to destroy both the cheaters and the bot farm
There are many real winners too who earned it. PH is still a good place. But we need to help PH to get better and be what it was years ago.
If anyone is launching on PH and suspects an unfair game, reach out to me. I will run my scrapers and scripts again to see and validate if the claim is true.
Again, not all top tools are cheating. From the list I've gotten, there is a pretty standard profile of a cheater startup. I don't wanna share it publicly since it might be offensive. And one more thing: I got 23 offers to buy fake upvotes yesterday. I played dumb and pretended I wanna buy it. I was kinda about to pay. But then at the last moment, I asked casually about their previous clients, just to be sure it was legit. Most gave me the list. I compared this list to the list from my analysis. The match was 100%.
P.S. Thanks to the indie maker community for all your support yesterday. All my actions would mean nothing if my posts on social media didn't get high exposure so that PH noticed it. I love the Indie community so much that I'd go to war for them.
Yesterday I launched Index Rusher. We were on top for half of the day and all of a sudden exact same thing started happening. A tool appeared out of nowhere and we dropped to be 2nd.
But this time I had a plan on how to destroy both the cheaters and the bot farm
- I scraped all voters of the cheater product.
- They all had the same pattern. They voted for the cheater and commented on the other random tool from the day. I fetched all commentators of the day and then fetched their votes and mapped it all in a table. I wish PH let me fetch all voters of a single tool, but it won't. So I had to do a lot of extra work to get this data. Most of the votes turned out to come from this schema. I reported each comment to the Product Hunt team(I reported 400 comments manually).
- I also reached out to their support team and they cooperated. So the PH team actually cares, that's great. I didn't expect this. Big respect.
- They removed the fake votes from the cheaters(the other top 2 products from the top 3 were cheating.
- Since those cheater accounts are also suspended from PH, it might mean the upvote farms have to create new accounts and spend weeks warming those up.
- I'm thinking of implementing an automated system to do all that I did so that it runs every day to expose all the cheaters.
- I do this because it breaks my heart when I realize how many honest and hardworking indie makers spent 24 hours promoting their launch and hoping for the best with no sleep but a VC-funded startup spent 5 minutes to buy the upvotes and won the day.
There are many real winners too who earned it. PH is still a good place. But we need to help PH to get better and be what it was years ago.
If anyone is launching on PH and suspects an unfair game, reach out to me. I will run my scrapers and scripts again to see and validate if the claim is true.
Again, not all top tools are cheating. From the list I've gotten, there is a pretty standard profile of a cheater startup. I don't wanna share it publicly since it might be offensive. And one more thing: I got 23 offers to buy fake upvotes yesterday. I played dumb and pretended I wanna buy it. I was kinda about to pay. But then at the last moment, I asked casually about their previous clients, just to be sure it was legit. Most gave me the list. I compared this list to the list from my analysis. The match was 100%.
P.S. Thanks to the indie maker community for all your support yesterday. All my actions would mean nothing if my posts on social media didn't get high exposure so that PH noticed it. I love the Indie community so much that I'd go to war for them.