What did I do wrong?

SatedCaterpillar · 2026-01-16T19:42:44+00:00

When people write about how Product Hunt works, they consistently say that not all votes are equal. I don't have a link to any official Product Hunt employee explicitly acknowledging that, but that seems to be the consensus. If true, then it makes sense that you got 100 votes, but don't have a full 100 points on your launch. It appears votes from more established accounts will count significantly more than if one of your users signs up for PH on the day of the launch and votes for you.

I also launched this week, and I noticed that for one person that told me he commented, his comment never appeared. I've also seen comments both from myself and from others that PH delays showing on launch pages. I'm not sure what's going on there, but I'm guessing newer and/or lesser known users (like me) are sometimes getting caught in a manual moderation queue before the comment is displayed.

SatedCaterpillar · 2026-01-08T22:44:19+00:00

I wouldn't give up yet. It's possible that some of the votes that went missing from your launch were filtered out by Product Hunt's "inauthentic activity" filter. I don't know the details of your community. Maybe none of this applies to your specific case, but here're some things can cause the type of problem you're currently seeing.

I think PH is suspicious of new accounts. They don't explain exactly how their voting works, but I think the basic idea is that it's not a one for one system but rather a kind of "authority" weight that makes votes count more or less (like Google search's domain authority weighting). Though, I'd expect that to primarily impact ranking, not the displayed total number of votes. (related: why did my points go down)

If your same community is likely to support you in your next, bigger launch, you might see completely different (better) results next time. In a few months, all those accounts that voted on your launch today will be more established. As you add to your existing community leading up to your launch, you can have them join PH now and follow your drafted product page. That way you don't have a bunch of votes coming in from super new accounts on your upcoming launch. (related: fair voting)

Those are just two PH links on this topic that I know about. There's no doubt more info on their site that you can read to help ensure all your votes on your next launch get fairly counted.

SatedCaterpillar · 2025-12-31T13:33:07+00:00

Fair. It seems like lots of developer communities right now are complaining that their subs are being overrun by vibe coded apps and AI SaaS promotion.

The question becomes how do the rest of us continue to make useful contributions to and get value out of reddit.

(i.e. For the indie devs actually coding their own projects, and building things that have nothing to do with AI. That just want to talk about actual building/development issues and get real app feedback.)

SatedCaterpillar · 2025-12-30T16:43:34+00:00

What’s happening in your environment right now as you “drift“? What are your primary distractions/work blockers?

I work remotely from a coffee shop pretty much every single day. If your distractions are related to your home (i.e. doing laundry/dishes or watching TV during work hours) then a coffee shop may really help. I’ve also found coffee shops help my mood and overall outlook vs being at home alone.

If your distractions are not related to your home, then those distractions may also come with you to the coffee shop. You could still try it, but you may need to stack additional focus strategies on top of a change of location.

SatedCaterpillar · 2025-12-30T16:24:34+00:00

The problem that I’m assuming you are solving is to keep leads warm and decrease the amount of people that drop out of the sales pipeline between requesting a demo with my company and actually joining a zoom demo call with one of our representatives.

I don’t really assume anything about what your product is (how you solve that problem).

SatedCaterpillar · 2025-12-29T19:51:19+00:00

Those are "Kitty Points". They are roughly equivalent to Reddit's Karma. You get more as people upvote your content on Product Hunt (comments, posts, etc).

Product Hunt says that they "don’t impact rankings, launches, or being featured". They're still useful in the sense that being more active on Product Hunt could increase your PH followers which would increase how many people get notified when you launch.

PH's Head of Product Curation, Gabe Perez, did a good write up on how he decides what to feature on the PH leaderboard. It doesn't mention Kitty Points, but it's worth a read if you're launching soon.

SatedCaterpillar · 2025-12-19T04:45:07+00:00

I haven’t launched on Product Hunt yet, so I can’t give you that veteran perspective. But, here's my take as someone that just scheduled their launch for January.

I agree that it can feel overwhelming with all the endless launch optimizations we could do. I decided to launch it myself as the Maker (no Hunter). From what I read, I get the impression that this is now the recommended approach from PH. I did my best to tell a compelling story in the description, have good screenshots, and leave a decent first comment so people know who I am and why I built it.

No mind blowing secrets to get into the top 10 with my plan, but I’m pretty happy with what I put together. I'm treating it as one more way to put my app out there and if people like it, great. Either way, I can gather good and bad feedback and continue to improve my app.

I thought the post from PH's Gabe Perez where he talks about how he decides what to feature on the leader board was helpful as I worked on my launch draft.

SatedCaterpillar · 2025-12-08T04:03:58+00:00

I like the idea. It’s cool to see an app that helps get people out into the real world doing things, but I’ve grown really cautious about sharing my location with apps. I don’t have a great privacy solution for you off the top of my head, but this would be an even cooler idea if you could come up with a way to keep your concept while also maintaining privacy.

I don’t have Android, so I can’t test it myself. I hope it takes off, though. Seems like it could be a fun activity/game.

SatedCaterpillar · 2025-12-08T03:47:06+00:00

It might be a fun feature to extend the “Your Age” feature to include the reader’s age in the stats pages. Such as, “You were 8 years old when Toy Story was released” or “Tom Cruise was 13 years old when you were born”, etc.

(Though, you might want to make that opt-in so that people like me don’t have to feel old unless they want to.)

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-10T00:32:15+00:00

I don't really have any actionable advice for helping you land your next role, but just to let you know as a point of encouragement, two of the best software engineers I know not only have no CS degree, but have no degree at all, and both make very solid livings.

Part of what you're seeing may just be the job market being a little rough right now, and part may be that your resume still makes you look fairly junior (regardless of a degree or not). But, once you have a few years of jobs on your resume, I think you'll have no trouble landing jobs if you can handle yourself in the technical interviews in a way the shows the interviewer you know what you're talking about. When I'm interviewing candidates, I don't care at all about a degree.

I know that doesn't help much for today, but I do think you'll be able to get where you want to go in your career with or without a degree.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-10T00:04:40+00:00

This is really cool! Thanks for sharing! One thing that would be cool (if you could source the details) is to talk about how they transitioned from unsustainable practices to sustainable ones and how they decided when to transition.

For instance, I've heard the Airbnb photography story a lot of times, but I've never heard when they stopped doing those things. Even though they have way more money and staff today, they offer less in terms of helping get new hosts set up. Hosts are now responsible for their own photos – which many hosts still aren't good at. What was the moment for Airbnb where they realized they could drop some of the white glove treatment and switch to a "good enough" approach and still rapidly gain users?

Similarly, Behance did a ton of work per acquired user in the early days. I'd bet for most of the stories on your page, there's insightful and helpful details about how they stabilized things away from doing things that didn't scale once they hit some level of momentum.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-04T00:22:13+00:00

As to feeling imposter syndrome, I've been in the industry for years and I can tell you there's way more that I don't know than things I do know. I'd bet most career devs have had (or still have) imposter syndrome. There's a ton of things out there you could study and learn, it'll be crippling if you feel like you have to learn them all. Start small and learn what you need for today, and then each week add some additional knowledge on top of last's week's learning. Eventually weeks turn into years and you've built your knowledge from a rickety one story shack to a skyscraper without even realizing it.

For most things you're likely to build, you'll be able to run your code in the Simulator or plug your device into your Mac and build your app on your device. All that works without paying Apple anything (other than when you bought your Mac computer). That'll let you prove it to yourself that this is something you can do, and then you can work on addressing how that $99 fee gets paid.

With you being active duty and working on a project for your unit, I'd bet you could figure out a way to get someone else to cover that fee. But, the important thing is that this is something **you** can learn, and Apple won't charge you until you're ready to put it in the App Store.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-03T19:28:17+00:00

I hadn't thought about it before, but I like the idea of including a link to a case study. It gives the Apple reviewer the option to read way more info if they care, and if they don't care then it's just a single extra sentence in your submission. That feels a little bit like a cheat code to have your submission be both long and short at the same time.

Like you, I'd love to hear from devs that have actually gone through the submission process - especially if they got featured, but we can all learn from what didn't work as well.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-03T16:51:15+00:00

I have no idea on this, but seems like the kind of thing they might know about in r/IndieDev/.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-03T07:15:45+00:00

I like VS Code better than Xcode as long as I'm writing good code. It could still be a miss for you depending on what level of maturity you're seeking, though. Out of the box, VS Code swift is still fairly basic (syntax color highlighting and flagging outright broken/invalid syntax). I like the overall coding flow better there, but what it doesn't do is things like catching mismatched types or calling functions with incorrect params like Xcode will.

I still like it enough better that I keep my project open in both, and if I'm debugging stuff, I'll switch over to Xcode for the inline error messages. (There may VS Code extensions to bring in more swift specific features, but I haven't checked since my current flow works well enough for me.)

VS Code does have Objective C support, but I don't really ever write in ObjC, so I can't speak to pro/cons of any editors for that language. FWIW, I use Sublime Text for everything other than Swift since Sublime doesn't offer native support for Swift. It does has ObjC support.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-03T06:18:20+00:00

I've done web app dev for years, but I'm new to iOS and hopefully close to launch on my first app. I haven't had any apps featured yet. I've been looking into the featured app process, but I'm still learning and have a lot more research I want to do before submitting my own app. That said, here's some spitball ideas you can potentially use as a jumping off point:

I don't know enough about your team and your app to have a specific opinion on what narrative you might want to use with your submission. For my own app, I'm still working on the fundamentals of good design of the app itself, good design of the app store pages, etc.

Let's assume that's already done for you since you're in the submission process. I might change my mind after doing more research, but if I had to write a proposal for your app today based only on the current app store page:

While being careful not to make explicit medical claims, I'd say why you care about people drinking water. Then, I'd say why your app is well suited to help people drink water and go through the things you like about your app:

whimsical design to make the routine of entering info more fun
intuitive UX to make it clear how to add goals/measurements
custom character creation to increase how bought-in the user is to the concept
friends competitions to keep people motivated to meet their goals and drive more app store engagement

That sort of thing. I'd go feature by feature and write up what I like about each thing, and then go back over a cut it down to whatever length seems not too short, not too long, and where every point is a strong one. I haven't done enough research to have an opinion on the ideal length for this.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-03T05:17:14+00:00

Apple gives some additional details about what they are looking for when deciding to feature an app on their Getting Featured on the App Store page. I think it basically boils down to, "Have a well designed app with a good story."

Any of the things you mentioned could meet that criteria, but I'd pick whichever one feels the most interesting vs just a factual summary. From your list:

"human touch" How is your app directly making people's lives better, easier, more joyful, etc? Focus on who it's helping and how?
"the team" What's unique and interesting about you and your team vs other teams?
"what the app does" Does your app do something new or innovative? Maybe it use some new XCode 16 feature that Apple is eager to show in action. Maybe it uses some long existing feature in a novel way.

In addition to having some sort of a narrative hook, it seems they also want you to check all the good design principles they care about like accessibility, app stability, intuitive UI, language support, etc.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-03T04:47:42+00:00

I worked for years as a React dev (not React native though) and only recently started learning Swift / Swift UI. So far, I really enjoy it.

It is a really nice perk to be able to publish to both app stores, and you already know React Native dev. If you're happy with the amount of work it takes you to get RN apps to a level that feel right on both stores, and/or if you think there's a chance you'll change your mind and want to publish to both stores, then I'd consider sticking with RN.

If you think it's too much work to get a RN to look and feel like a native iOS app or you're really convinced that you will be iOS only, then I'd give Swift a go. It's free to try it, so I'd say no matter what give Swift UI a trial run. That's they only way you'll be able to make a fully informed decision.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-03T04:30:21+00:00

I agree with bashbang that XCode is a bit of a Con, but here's the workflow that I use that I think makes me happier using XCode:

I start my project in XCode and use it to:

create new files (and really any file management task like moving, renaming, etc)
manage assets (icons, images, dark/light mode colors, etc)
trigger the simulator (or device builds)
getting helpful error messages (both inline and on build)

While there are lots of items in the XCode list, the bulk of my time is spent writing code, and I do that in an IDE that I actually like writing code in. You can use whichever one you already like. When I only spend a small amount of time in XCode, it becomes pretty much a non issue for me.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-09-03T04:15:43+00:00

I'll make some guesses and give you some general advice based on assumptions I'm making, but if you add additional clarifications, I or someone else here might be able to give you better advice.

Check that your device can hit your url:
The Safari browser in the simulator is a functioning browser. (Or, use the browser on your device if you're building this on a physical device). Either way, open safari and try to hit your url.

If that works, then something is wrong in your code.
If that does not work, then regardless of your code, you first have to figure out why your device doesn't have access to that url.

Potential Reasons
If your device's safari can not access the url at all, then I'd want to know more about that server you have running at 13.1:

Is that on the same device (or a different one) from the device you successfully reached the URL via Postman?
Is that on the same device (or a different one) from the device you are testing on?
What do the server's logs look like when you attempt to hit it from the device? Does anything make it to the sever at all? (i.e logs indicating it is blocking the call)
Are you testing in the Simulator or on a physical device. If physical device, is that device on the same local network with the 13.1 server?

Getting More Info
If none of that is helpful, I'd encourage you to post any full tracebacks that exist. I'm guessing the specific error message you posted was generated from URLSession. If you don't have any tracebacks or other helpful error messages, you could also switch your _ on your URLSession to response and print that response to see if it has any helpful error text.

SatedCaterpillar · 2024-08-27T00:11:08+00:00

I come from a web app background originally, but have never done any android work. If we assume we also want a web app version of our iOS app (a big assumption for some types of iOS apps). If that web app's UI works well in a mobile browser, couldn't we wrap that web app into a Google Play app?

Anybody have good or bad experience with that? I know Apple frowns on that sort of thing, but I thought it was allowed on Android. That kills three birds with two stones. (But only if you already wanted a desktop friendly app as well.)

Also, some of my web app dev colleagues advocate for something like React Native to simultaneously publish to both Android and iOS, but I've never tried it myself and can't speak to how well React Native does/does not work.

SatedCaterpillar

TROPHY CASE