Should you launch on Product Hunt during the holidays?

Introduction

Product Hunt is a very popular website where up-and-coming startups launch and list their products to the Product Hunt community. After launching on a specific day, Product Hunt users vote for the products that they like, and the most popular launches get ranked at the top & get featured on the Product Hunt home page. A successful launch on Product Hunt can get an early stage startup hundreds if not thousands of new users, investors, and - most importantly - valuable feedback to make the product better.

We at Databar.ai launched back in January 2022 and were able to secure a #2 Featured spot for the day. We would like to get back to the Featured page and decided to do a small analysis of how previous projects have fared during holiday season.

All of the below data and charts were gathered and visualized using databar.ai. Sign up today to connect to the Product Hunt API without code!

Is Product Hunt slow during holiday season?

To find out how active Product Hunt is during the holiday season, we plotted the total number of upvotes all products on a given day got at the end of December 2019 - 2022:

Here are the number of upvotes for the top 3 posts for every day at the end of December in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022:

Specifically for 2020:

2021:

Holiday season on Product Hunt in 2022

This chart shows the number of posts every day at the end of December 2022 and the number of upvotes for the top 3 posts:

There was a steep drop on December 17 & 18 of 2022 which was due to the weekend (Product Hunt is less active on Saturdays & Sundays), with a steep drop in launches to match the fall in upvotes. Although the week leading up to Christmas still performed well with upvotes falling heading into Christmas Eve, we can see a significant drop compared to the week before.

On December 23 (Friday), 31 products launched versus 42 the previous Friday (December 16). The top 3 products got 474, 408, and 333 upvotes respectively compared to 2126, 1371, and 968 the week before. This may be due to higher quality products launching at the end of the year before holiday season; however, the overall  

What's interesting is to see how evenly the top 3 products get upvotes during holiday season. The difference in upvotes between #1 and the rest is much higher throughout the year than during the last two weeks of December. If you have a Beta or a product that's not quite ready to take Product Hunt by storm, the end of December is a good time to get that Featured badge & to appear at the top.

Summarizing

To summarize, holiday season is still a good time to launch on Product Hunt - there's a steady flow of users that visit the site before the holiday season and from December 25 - December 31. However, it is unlikely to get more than 600-700 upvotes leading into the last weeks of December. Christmas eve sees a drop as expected every year, and so does December 30-31. However, the holiday season also offers less competition than other periods with much fewer products launching during those days.

Build your own Product Hunt API connector

All of the above charts were visualized with Databar.ai's no-code editor. Would you like to build your own charts like this without code? Sign up today.

Data sources used in this article:

• Product Hunt API
  • The official Product Hunt API, now available without code.

APIs & datasets used in this article:

• Product Hunt top featured posts
  • Get the top featured posts on Product Hunt.

Other APIs & datasets from Product Hunt:

• Get details about a specific Product Hunt user
• Get the latest comments on Product Hunt
• Get all followers of a Product Hunt user
• See all votes for a Product Hunt post
• Get all users a Product Hunt user is following

 

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