>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.

> 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!

There are many factors for your project being a success on PH, but I must agree with @yoshyosh that the most crucial thing is having a product that caters to the audience on the platform.

I've posted a product on PH at the start of the year and basically got the same response as Screely. It's a fairly simple app that's catered to a specific audience (SEO, web developers...), so the response was more than a thousand upvotes and a lot of traction on other platforms as well.

I think it doesn't matter if the project is complex or even completely finished, as long as it solves a specific problem of the audience you are presenting it to, it will get traction. Sometimes the problem is the right way to present your project to the audience though, more so with complex projects...

I think it most likely has to do with catering to the PH audience and what they may like. HN, DN, and other sites work the same way, most of the time your product/content has to cater to that audience's interests. It can also depend on when you posted, since new products go live on the homepage after midnight.

it may be just sheer luck. Or there may be a ring of influencers effectively rigging the votes. But I guess luck explains it: there are thousands of dumb products like this that don't get many votes also.