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by 0verAchiever 2955 days ago
>Tangentially, though, I'd love to know how such a simple, half-functional, and clearly proof-of-concept site can garner almost a thousand upvotes on ProductHunt?! I've submitted substantially more complex (and finished) products in the past that have only gotten 5-40 upvotes and like 2 comments a pop.

As the others have stated, complexity does not equal value to the user. I think that the simplicity is exactly what people like about it. It doesn't try to do everything, it only does one thing and that makes it easy to use and easy to understand the value proposition.

People on PH and HN are very tolerant of MVP's and understand they won't function perfectly and not have many features. It only does one thing and it does it well in 95% of the cases.

>Is it a matter of getting an influencer to post it for you? Does wip.chat help with this? I find it utterly bizarre.

There is no secret to doing well during your launch (or at least, not that I know of), but it's a combination of lots of smaller variables (timing, luck, optimizing your post and more). As you can see I hunted Screely myself from a relatively new account so I don't think this plays a role.

You are not allowed to ask for upvotes so wip.chat does not help in this way. There are plenty of products that came out of wip.chat that did not do well at all.

However, I think there is a huge amount of value in being part of a community of makers/developers/designers. I have gotten feedback from others during development, they helped me when I got stuck with programming issues and they gave me tips for how I should launch. Wip chat will not magically make your launch do well but it will help you make a product than can do well on it's own.

1 comments

> I think that the simplicity is exactly what people like about it.

I totally agree. I know there's a bitchy comment on the PH about it 'not doing enough', but I think that's ridiculous: your tool is designed to solve one specific task, and it appears to do that very well, so please concentrate on small, incremental polish rather than totally changing the nature of it!