It was a well thought out plan, following the rules to the dot and we executed it well. By 11am GMT our listing had around 50 upvotes. Amercia is still sleeping and we had 50. In fact it had the 5th most upvotes from all listings across the board. Yet we were still in the “Newest” section, which I found really weird.

Since we did our research on the topic we knew very well that the PH algorithm works in mysterious ways and it is heavily biased towards PH’s power users, but we never thought it is this much biased. We had a good amount of upvotes from relatively new members and a handful from mid level members, but it wasn’t enough.

Of course if you are not on the main page, you lose out on the casual users of Product Hunt, therefore you lose out on lots of eyeballs and lots of further upvotes. It is a self generating process.

It was really frustrating to see that there were products in the “Popular” category with 1–2 upvotes, while our app was actually going further and further down in the “Newest” category (which is ordered by the time of submission)

To channel my frustration I was looking to find some explanation. After reading the seemingly same articles over and over again I came across this one that was eye opening. Full disclosure: I have no way of verifying if this is still true but from what I’ve seen it is quite likely. TL;DR for the article (and some of our own observations):

There are only a handful of PH users who have the power to move products from Newest to Popular b̶y̶ ̶u̶p̶v̶o̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶i̶t̶

EDIT: we received a reply from the PH team:

This isn’t quite true: we (the PH team) look at every product that’s hunted and curate the homefeed. Upvotes from certain users is not part of the process. Certain community members can hunt directly to the homepage, but we look at every post. No magic “upvote” is part of it.