Product Hunt analysis
Lately, I've been thinking about startup trends. A few years ago, everyone was obsessed with blockchain, then it was chatbots, AI, ICOs, and so on. Every other year there's a new hype train people rush to jump on.
Many of these "hot" startups end up on Product Hunt. So I decided to parse all featured products submitted since their launch on November 24, 2013, up until June 30, 2019, and see what insights I could get from the data.
In total, there were 151 739 products submitted, and 37 506 of them got featured. On average, 75 products were submitted per day, and 19 of those were featured (roughly 25%).
Product Hunt really blew up in February 2015 when it won the Crunchie "Best New Startup of 2014" award. By fall 2016, submissions started to decline, and in the last two years things have more or less plateaued:
All analysis below is based only on featured products, since parsing non-featured ones would have taken too long.
About one-third of the products featured in 2013–2016 are now dead (i.e., their websites are no longer accessible). Even ≈8% of the recently featured products in 2019 are already gone.
Top products
Most voted products
Sorted by the number of votes.
- 18 446 Startup Stash — A curated directory of 400 resources & tools for startups (Feb 2015).
- 14 649 Slack — Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving & search (Dec 2013).
- 11 032 remove.bg — Remove the background of any image 100% automatically (Dec 2018).
- 9 422 Startup Pitch Decks — Real decks from real startups that raised over $400M (Sep 2016).
- 9 186 Pexels 2.0 — The best free stock photos in one place (May 2015).
- 7 975 Station — One app to rule them all (Oct 2017).
- 7 525 Coolors — Super fast color schemes generator for cool designers (Oct 2014).
- 7 124 Hotjar — See how your visitors are really using your site for free (Jul 2015).
- 6 594 Hunter — Find all the email addresses related to a domain (Apr 2015).
- 6 534 Good Email Copy — Email copy from great companies (Apr 2016).
Most commented products
Sorted by the number of comments.
- 712 Polymail — A simple, beautiful, and powerful email client for Mac (Dec 2015).
- 516 Polymail iOS — Simple, beautiful, powerful email for iOS (Feb 2016).
- 415 Station — One app to rule them all (Oct 2017).
- 345 Taskful ☠️ — A smart to-do list that divides up your tasks for the day (Jun 2017).
- 305 Loom — Seamless screen, mic, and camera recording for Chrome (Jun 2016).
- 295 Buy Me A Coffee — A free, fast and beautiful way to accept support (Jan 2018).
- 290 Live Crypto Community Tracker — View and track social followings of major cryptocurrencies (Jun 2018).
- 272 Prisma — AI that turns your photos into artwork in seconds (Jul 2016).
- 262 Gboard by Google — Google Search, GIFs, emojis & moreright from your keyboard (May 2016).
- 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.
- 0.2 Bonfire ☠️ — The new group video chat app from Facebook (Sep 2017).
- 0.3 Michelangelo, by Uber — Uber's machine-learning-as-a-service platform (Sep 2017).
- 0.3 ProType — The next generation MVC JavaScript framework (May 2018).
- 0.3 GitHub Gardener — Make your github history green, with daily automated commits (May 2018).
- 0.4 Aims ☠️ — A simple, beautiful personal task manager (Nov 2017).
- 0.4 Simple Phone ☠️ — A launcher that helps you focus on the more important things (Jun 2018).
- 0.4 Convertify — Convert your website to an iOS and Android app (Nov 2018).
- 0.4 iPhone X Web-Viewer — View your website on an iPhone X (Sep 2017).
- 0.5 Video Downloader — Download any online video from your favorite websites (Jun 2018).
- 0.5 Direct by Instagram — Instagram's new messaging app (Dec 2017).
The aggregated rating isn't really a reliable metric for "best-rated" products, since a product can get a 5-star rating from a single positive vote. I decided to skip that part.
Top users
A user who submits a product is called a hunter. On the product page, they might also mention the author (who becomes the maker). Only Ryan and Ben are both top makers and hunters.
Makers
Sorted by the number of products made that have been featured.
- 57
Mubashar Iqbal
- 54
Ryan Hoover 🔶
- 46
Clark Valberg
- 45
Justin Jackson
- 43
jason
- 35
David Cancel
- 33
Ben Tossell 🔷
- 32
Ahmet Sülek
- 29
Harry Stebbings
- 29
Pieter Levels
Hunters
Sorted by the number of hunted products that have been featured.
- 1 324
Kevin William David
- 1 159
Chris Messina
- 916
Jack Smith
- 824
Eric Willis
- 609
- 607
- 408
Kristofer™
- 392
Bram Kanstein (@bramk)
- 262
Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré
- 249
Hiten Shah
Technology
Back in 2013, only 20% of featured products had HTTPS in their URLs. Now it's more than 95%, thanks in large part to Let's Encrypt.
Techonologies
- 33.8% jQuery — 12 626 products
- 31.5% Google Analytics — 11 767 products
- 24.8% Google Fonts — 9 268 products
- 11.1% Wordpress — 4 155 products
- 4.0% Intercom — 1 509 products
- 1.7% Sentry — 640 products
Hosters
- 22.6% Cloudflare — 8 420 products
- 4.1% Amazon S3 — 1 528 products
- 3.9% GitHub — 1 469 products
- 3.5% Netlify — 1 291 products
- 1.5% Amazon CloudFront — 555 products
- 1.4% Squarespace — 504 products
Best time to submit
In general, fewer products get submitted on weekends, but the feature rate is higher — you've got about a 20% better chance of being featured. The tradeoff is that weekend products usually get fewer votes. On weekdays it's the opposite: feature rate is lower, but products get more votes.
So if you're confident your product will get featured, it makes sense to launch on Tuesday or Wednesday, when products tend to get the most votes.
Categories
I decided to categorize products myself instead of using Product Hunt's built-in topics. For example, if a product description includes "3D", it goes into the "3D" category. If the product URL contains "amazon.com", it goes into "Books", and so on.
SEO and No-Code are most active categories. The related products get more votes and more comments on average than products in other categories.
Most commented
Sorted by median comments per product.
- 16 SEO — 176 products total
- 15.5 No-Code — 86 products total
- 15 Biohacking — 59 products total
- 14 SaaS — 997 products total
- 14 Remote — 503 products total
Most voted
Sorted by median votes per product.
- 394 SEO — 176 products total
- 348 No-Code — 86 products total
- 282 Design — 4642 products total
- 277 Startup — 1119 products total
- 267 SaaS — 997 products total
Other insights
Based on the charts below.
- In 2014 a featured product belonged to 1.6 categories on average. Now it's 4.1 categories.
- Shift towards work-life balance: more products related to leisure and non-work activities get featured.
- At the same time work-related categories are getting more featured products as well.
- Despite social media fatigue, the number of related products is still rising.
- Although there is a rise of podcasting the number of podcast products is still low and increasing slowly.
- The number of physical products (especially Books) peaked in Q3 2015. Then it plummeted by half.
The following charts represent the percentage of categories across all featured products. For example, 36.7% of products featured in Q3 2015 belong to the "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 building such a powerful charting library and letting people use it for free on personal blogs!