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## **The Hard Part First: Mistakes So You Don’t Make Them** ### **1. We got shadow banned** This is the single biggest thing that hurt us, and the thing I most want you to avoid. It started around 6:45am PDT. Our upvote-to-point ratio shifted to roughly 5:1 and stayed there for the rest of the day. Meaning: for every 5 real upvotes from real supporters, only 1 point was registering in the rankings. **How to tell if you’re shadow banned:** First, check your dashboard. Early on we were seeing a healthy upvote-to-point ratio. Then a wave of community supporters got notified and voted - a small spike - and that was enough to trigger Product Hunt’s spam filter. Even a modest surge in a short window can flag you. Second, compare your page followers to your points. We grew from 200 to over 1,600 followers on launch day, but ended with only 334 points. That gap is the shadow ban in action. Third, test with verified makers. We had verified makers from a peer company (who had just launched that same week) try to upvote us. 4 upvotes from them didn’t convert to a single point. That confirmed it. **What can you do about it?** Honestly, not much. We emailed Product Hunt’s customer service, their CEO, and their CTO. There is basically no way to lift it once it’s triggered. We believe we were still under the shadow ban even after the day ended. Normally, top products get organic traffic from PH itself after the rankings settle, which should translate to more points. We didn’t see that. *Side note: was this manually triggered?* We think yes. At the exact same time our points got cut, a PH editor also manually changed our page listing name. The timing felt like more than a coincidence. ### **2. Page listing bug** This one is partly on Product Hunt, partly on us. We were still making changes to our listing the day before the scheduled launch. Those changes - the name, tagline, and description - didn’t get applied when we went live. The video and preview images we added did apply. So we launched with outdated copy and no way to fix it quickly. You can always email [hello@producthunt.com](mailto:hello@producthunt.com), but their customer service is not prompt. Build in time for this. **One specific thing that caught us:** We noticed some YC companies included their batch info in their listing title, like `CompanyName (YC S23)`. We did the same, listing ourselves as `SUN (a16z speedrun 006)` to follow that convention. A PH editor flagged it - this format is no longer allowed. If your company is backed by an accelerator, don’t assume the naming convention you’ve seen elsewhere still applies. ### **3. We didn’t reach enough people early enough on LinkedIn** We underestimated how constrained LinkedIn is as an outreach tool. We hit the weekly friend-request limit and ran out of direct messaging capacity right when we needed it most. LinkedIn only lets you message first-degree connections directly. Everyone else requires an InMail credit. And there’s a hard weekly cap on friend requests - hit it once and you’re locked out for the rest of the week. The fix: start building your LinkedIn network weeks before launch. Add connections steadily week over week. ### **4. We didn’t build a real relationship with our hunter** We secured our hunter two days before launch. That’s too late. We didn’t get featured in the first 30 minutes, which may partly be because our listing page was put up too late, and partly because we didn’t have a hunter who was genuinely invested in our success. Our hunter didn’t comment on our product. We didn’t receive feedback on our listing copy. We didn’t fully leverage the maker-hunter relationship at all, simply because we ran out of time. So find your hunter at least one week out. Build an actual relationship. Give them enough time to care.