Startups launching new products live or die by the enthusiasm and retention of their early adopters (don't I know it!). So naturally, when my startup was featured on ProductHunt, I wanted to make sure that I stay in touch with everyone who likes our product.
Unfortunately, getting a list of the people who upvoted your product isn't easy and the official word is that you have to use the ProductHunt API. I'm all for the API, but I needed something in a pinch for a campaign we were working on so I came up with a hack that uses screen scraping techniques until someone finds the time to write a proper tool.
Here are the steps demoed in the above video:
- Go to your ProductHunt page like http://www.producthunt.com/tech/freebusy
- Ensure that upvotes data is loaded into your browser by using the scroll arrows for the upvotes list to scroll through the entire list
- If you're using Firefox bring up Firebug, if you're using Chrome or Internet Explorer bring up Developer Tools (F12 key works as a shortcut on Windows)
- Use the element selector to hover over the list of upvotes
- Copy the HTML of the upvotes list elements
- Paste into text editor (Sublime Text, Notepad++, or any other that supports find by regex)
- Use Find all with this regular expression:
href="/@\w+"
- Copy find results into new file
- Use Find and Replace to strip the leading
href="/
and the trailing"
- You now have Twitter usernames for the people who upvoted your product
@andreasklinger @ProductHunt hi, it's unclear from https://t.co/45kWapDZ1L the state of export to csv. I'd like to export my votes. Thanks
— Stefan Negritoiu (@stefann42) June 16, 2015
@stefann42 Hey, you can grab all of your votes with https://t.co/cNxBJYo772 :) @andreasklinger @ProductHunt
— Mike Coutermarsh (@mscccc) June 16, 2015
@stefann42 we do the csv export manually for ppl & it needs some work. api would be faster right now :) sry @andreasklinger @ProductHunt
— Mike Coutermarsh (@mscccc) June 16, 2015