Product Hunt analysis

This blog post contains a lot of JS charts, so it’s better to view it in a browser.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about startup trends. A few years ago everyone was obsessed with blockchain, then chatbots, AI, ICOs, and so on. Every other year there is a new hype train that people want to jump on.

Many of these new hot startups get submitted to Product Hunt. So I decided to parse all featured products submitted since its launch on November 24, 2013, until June 30, 2019, and try to get some insights from the data.

There have been 151 739 products submitted, 37 506 of them have been featured. In average there have been 75 products submitted per day, 19 of them have been featured (roughly 25% of products get featured).

Product Hunt got really popular in February 2015 when it won the Crunchie "Best new startup of 2014" award. In fall 2016 the number of submitted products started to decline. In the last two years it reached a plateau:

All analysis below is based only on featured products as parsing also non-featured products would have taken too much time.

About one-third of the products featured in 2013-2016 are dead now (i.e., a product’s website isn’t accessible). Even ≈8% of the recently featured products in 2019 are dead.

Top products

Most voted products

Sorted by the number of votes.

  1. 18 446 Startup Stash — A curated directory of 400 resources & tools for startups (Feb 2015).
  2. 14 649 Slack — Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving & search (Dec 2013).
  3. 11 032 remove.bg — Remove the background of any image 100% automatically (Dec 2018).
  4. 9 422 Startup Pitch Decks — Real decks from real startups that raised over $400M (Sep 2016).
  5. 9 186 Pexels 2.0 — The best free stock photos in one place (May 2015).
  6. 7 975 Station — One app to rule them all (Oct 2017).
  7. 7 525 Coolors — Super fast color schemes generator for cool designers (Oct 2014).
  8. 7 124 Hotjar — See how your visitors are really using your site for free (Jul 2015).
  9. 6 594 Hunter — Find all the email addresses related to a domain (Apr 2015).
  10. 6 534 Good Email Copy — Email copy from great companies (Apr 2016).

Most commented products

Sorted by the number of comments.

  1. 712 Polymail — A simple, beautiful, and powerful email client for Mac (Dec 2015).
  2. 516 Polymail iOS — Simple, beautiful, powerful email for iOS (Feb 2016).
  3. 415 Station — One app to rule them all (Oct 2017).
  4. 345 Taskful ☠️ — A smart to-do list that divides up your tasks for the day (Jun 2017).
  5. 305 Loom — Seamless screen, mic, and camera recording for Chrome (Jun 2016).
  6. 295 Buy Me A Coffee — A free, fast and beautiful way to accept support (Jan 2018).
  7. 290 Live Crypto Community Tracker — View and track social followings of major cryptocurrencies (Jun 2018).
  8. 272 Prisma — AI that turns your photos into artwork in seconds (Jul 2016).
  9. 262 Gboard by Google — Google Search, GIFs, emojis & moreright from your keyboard (May 2016).
  10. 254 Toby — Better Than Bookmarks (Sep 2016).

Worst rated products

Users could vote whether they would recommend a product to a friend or not. The API doesn’t return these two separate numbers, only the aggregated one (called "rating"). The lower this rating is, the more users voted that they won’t recommend this product.

  1. 0.2 Bonfire ☠️ — The new group video chat app from Facebook (Sep 2017).
  2. 0.3 Michelangelo, by Uber — Uber’s machine-learning-as-a-service platform (Sep 2017).
  3. 0.3 ProType — The next generation MVC JavaScript framework (May 2018).
  4. 0.3 GitHub Gardener — Make your github history green, with daily automated commits (May 2018).
  5. 0.4 Aims ☠️ — A simple, beautiful personal task manager (Nov 2017).
  6. 0.4 Simple Phone ☠️ — A launcher that helps you focus on the more important things (Jun 2018).
  7. 0.4 Convertify — Convert your website to an iOS and Android app (Nov 2018).
  8. 0.4 iPhone X Web-Viewer — View your website on an iPhone X (Sep 2017).
  9. 0.5 Video Downloader — Download any online video from your favorite websites (Jun 2018).
  10. 0.5 Direct by Instagram — Instagram’s new messaging app (Dec 2017).

The aggregated rating isn’t a reliable metric for determining best-rated products since for a product to get 5-star rating it’s enough just for one user to vote positive. I decided to just skip that part.

Top users

A user who submitted a product is a hunter. On the product page, they might also mention the author (who becomes a product’s maker). Only Ryan and Ben are both top makers and hunters.

Makers

Sorted by the number of made products that have been featured.

  1. 57 Mubashar Iqbal
  2. 54 Ryan Hoover 🔶
  3. 46 Clark Valberg
  4. 45 Justin Jackson
  5. 43 jason
  6. 35 David Cancel
  7. 33 Ben Tossell 🔷
  8. 32 Ahmet Sülek
  9. 29 Harry Stebbings
  10. 29 Pieter Levels

Hunters

Sorted by the number of hunted products that have been featured.

  1. 1 324 Kevin William David
  2. 1 159 Chris Messina
  3. 916 Jack Smith
  4. 824 Eric Willis
  5. 609 Ben Tossell 🔷
  6. 607 Ryan Hoover 🔶
  7. 408 Kristofer™
  8. 392 Bram Kanstein (@bramk)
  9. 262 Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré
  10. 249 Hiten Shah

Technology

In 2013 only 20% of featured products had HTTPS in their website URL. Now it’s more than 95% thanks to Let’s Encrypt.

Techonologies

  1. 33.8% jQuery — 12 626 products
  2. 31.5% Google Analytics — 11 767 products
  3. 24.8% Google Fonts — 9 268 products
  4. 11.1% Wordpress — 4 155 products
  5. 4.0% Intercom — 1 509 products
  6. 1.7% Sentry — 640 products

Hosters

  1. 22.6% Cloudflare — 8 420 products
  2. 4.1% Amazon S3 — 1 528 products
  3. 3.9% GitHub — 1 469 products
  4. 3.5% Netlify — 1 291 products
  5. 1.5% Amazon CloudFront — 555 products
  6. 1.4% Squarespace — 504 products

Best time to submit

In general, fewer products get submitted on a weekend, but the feature rate is higher. You have ≈20% more chance to get featured. On the other hand, products on average get fewer votes on a weekend. On weekdays it’s the other way round: the feature rate is lower, but products get more votes.

If you’re sure that your product gets featured then it makes sense to submit it on Tuesday or Wednesday, when products on average get more votes.

Categories

I decided to categorize products myself instead of using Product Hunt topics. For example, if a product has "3D" in its descriptions it goes to "3D" category. If a product URL contains "amazon.com", then the product goes to "Books" category, and so on.

SEO and No-Code are most active categories. The related products get more votes and more comments on average that products in other categories.

Most commented

Sorted by median comments per product.

  1. 16 SEO — 176 products total
  2. 15.5 No-Code — 86 products total
  3. 15 Biohacking — 59 products total
  4. 14 SaaS — 997 products total
  5. 14 Remote — 503 products total

Most voted

Sorted by median votes per product.

  1. 394 SEO — 176 products total
  2. 348 No-Code — 86 products total
  3. 282 Design — 4642 products total
  4. 277 Startup — 1119 products total
  5. 267 SaaS — 997 products total

Other insights

Based on the charts below.

The following charts represent the percent of categories across all featured products. For example, 36.7% of products featured in Q3 2015 belong to "Apple" category. All charts have the same scale. I also hid the charts of categories that have little data.

Companies

Technologies

Leisure and activities

News and information

Data

Other

Thanks to Product Hunt for making their data available via a simple API and to Highcharts for creating a powerful charting library and letting it use for free for personal blogs!

Hi 👋
My name is Kirill Maltsev. I blog about building web products, coding, and other stuff. Receive new blog posts via the RSS feed or by email.