Putting Kosshi on Product Hunt turned out pretty well

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I put Kosshi on Product Hunt.

It had been about two months since the release. Kosshi was gradually picking up users in Japan, but barely anyone outside Japan was using it. That was where things stood at this point.

When I lined the reasons up, well, yeah, that tracked. On social media I post almost exclusively in Japanese, and I'd said essentially nothing in any English-speaking community. Searching the App Store in English mostly returned nothing for me, and the English version of my site wasn't even indexed by Google. From the outside, there was effectively no way to find out the app existed.

So I put it up on Product Hunt, and the response was more than I'd expected. Products there get upvoted each day, and Kosshi ended up at tenth place. Which is — held its own, I think? (Or, am I allowed to say that?)

Kosshi on Product Hunt: Day Rank #10 in the Note and writing category, with 92 upvotes

An outliner is the kind of tool whose value really only comes through once you've used it heavily, so I'd quietly given up on the idea of conveying that to people who aren't already familiar with the genre. On top of that, I don't really have any reach of my own, so this was pretty much an organic situation: the product on its own merits, in a straight fight.

The fact that there was more of a response than I'd expected makes me wonder: maybe the outliner as a product category is more widely recognized than I'd been giving it credit for?

Or maybe, in a place like Product Hunt where everything tends to be brand-new and bleeding-edge, the fact that Kosshi has a relatively conservative feature set made it stand out by contrast.

If I'd known it was going to land this well, I'd have swapped in the new screenshot thumbnails I'd just made, and put more effort into actually explaining what an outliner is.

On the flip side, my inbox quickly filled with a steady stream of SEO spam like "your site isn't doing nearly enough SEO" — an unwelcome side effect. It seems there's a viable business in monitoring Product Hunt rankings.

For what it's worth, I spent a good chunk of my career as a search engineer. I know search systems from the inside out, and I've done SEO at massive scale. Which is to say: anyone trying to school me here is, frankly, about a century early. Although, as I mentioned, my English site wasn't indexed by Google until about a week ago, so, well, maybe I'm not really one to talk.

Mixed in with all that, though, an inquiry came in from someone who'd clearly been on the hunt for an outliner. The depth of what they were asking made it obvious this wasn't casual browsing. The volume wasn't large, but being found by that kind of person was a much bigger deal to me than the rank itself. Kosshi has quite a bit of behind-the-scenes engineering going on, so maybe what happened is that this kind of person picked up on it.

In the end, I'm glad I put it out.

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