Launched Milestones Leaderboard
by Courtland AllenAs of a few hours ago, there's a new section of the IH community called Milestones.
It's a barebones MVP at this point, but my hope is that it can grow into a place where we can celebrate and learn from each other's accomplishments. Specifically, I'd like to see everyone making posts that go beyond merely announcements… posts that explain how you reached your milestones and the things you learned along the way. Then the rest of us can learn, too. 🕺
There's still a lot of work to go with this feature. As is, you can't even submit to the leaderboard directly — you just have to make a post to your product page and hope that either @rosiesherry or I find it and add it for you. But here are a few things I'll be thinking about out in the near future:
- What's the best user experience for submitting a milestone? Perhaps all posts to product pages should be milestones?
- Free-form milestones vs a list of milestones to choose from… I'm leaning toward free-form, at least to start.
- Free-form textbox for describing your milestone vs prompts, almost like a mini interview (e.g. "how did you hit this milestone? what did you learn?). Again, I'm leaning toward free-form to start.
- Should I hide all milestone posts from the newest feed, or allow them to continue appearing there and in the milestones leaderboard? For now I'm just leaving them.
- Should I create a special newsletter just for subscribing to the top milestones each day or week?
- etc.
Your ideas and feedback are always welcome!
-
3
I like the idea of having 2 different feed, the personal one and the product one! ✌️
I think that every post to a product page should be considered a milestone. It would be an incentive to write something truly interesting that could end up at the top of the leaderboard.
-
2
I would like to see some useful tags. Something like: product launch, acquiring first customers, first hire etc.
Being able to read how other founders overcome the same problem you have right now would be awesome.
-
1
Love this idea
-
-
1
Following up on this. You cannot engage with milestones as a user to the same degree as posts that are not self-centered and about the community. Therefore putting milestones at the top is a detractor.
-
1
That's true for the most part, but I think it isn't the only factor to consider. Here are a few others:
- I'm only putting the best three milestone posts per day at the top of the forum, rather than random milestone posts.
- The best milestone posts tend to be educational, and their educational value should only improve over time as the feature gets better and as competition for the top few slots increases. The discussions they lead to tend to help everyone else in accomplishing the same goals.
- Eventually, milestone posts could serve as a helpful repository for information for people to search through. For example, searching "how to launch on Product Hunt" might reveal numerous milestones about hitting #1 on Product Hunt.
- Milestones attract experts who've accomplished things, and experts are the best givers of advice. Bringing more experts to the community is good things, because they often stay and engage with various people.
- The best milestone posts are still better than the best self-focused posts, but they won't exist without incentives. Generally, milestone posts are rare and need to be directly encouraged, hence the privileged positioning.
- Similarly, IH has had product pages forever, but people rarely post to them, making them quite useless. The new milestones feature has started giving product page posts as lot of attention they never had before, which is encouraging people to most of them. This helps everyone, because they products directory no longer a ghost town full of dead products.
-
1
Thanks for finally moving the milestone leaderboard to the sidebar. But it really shouldn't have taken 9 months to figure out.
-
1
Those are good points. My only concern is that you will find in a couple months that it comes at a cost to the overall engagement.
Having spent a lot of time on reddit, I am very aware of how overweighted the focus of folks is towards the top 1-4 posts, so to have that taken over is a huge change to the site.
Overall, I like it and more importantly love your willingness to experiment.
-
-
1
What's to stop someone lying to get to the top of the leaderboard to grab some free traffic?
-
1
It would be nice for the milestone posts to have a direct link to the product they are talking about.
-
1
On my roadmap! Should help people get some traffic when they do well on the leaderboard.
-
-
0
No, not all posts to product pages should be considered milestones because that would limit what is posted to the product page.
Could be the button right next to NEW POST.
Free-form.
How would they get points if they are not in the newest queue?
Milestone features should not hold more weight than community posts. They should be in the sidebar or in a spot in the feed below the top posts [like twitter does for suggested posts].
