Product Hunt tanked (post-mortem).

I'd mirror the Primer's reply, that PH/IN/HN cluster is not a good reflection of the wide world. It's easier to reach people there with new things, but there are many viable products that just don't have much of a market (relatively) among hackers, startup people etc.

I would care more about long-term discoverability than about burst launches. Mainly search engines: will people looking for "converting excel to html tables" (or something similar) find you? I've launched many, mainly hobby things, and in general people don't care, unless you're extremely lucky. But by just existing and persevering you can slowly accumulate something. It's more of a problem if you need or want instant growth and/or profitability.

I don't think you did anything wrong.
I'd go back to the economist and ask her what sites she visits and go engage folks on those sites about how this might solve a problem or them.

Having to install something creates a lot of friction. Even creating an account does so.
The only time i launched something on Product Hunt, it got 500 upvotes and was not even a real product, but you could test it instantly from the landing page.

Did you ever define your target audience? I think most of the people who want to try your product are googling "excel table in email" and are not magically on Product Hunt looking for your app, its super niche. You should definitely, do SEO for this to at least appear in the top 3 spots in the google search. You can also answer in all related threads to your product like on these pages:

• https://superuser.com/questions/1221311/how-to-copy-from-excel-to-outlook-and-keep-the-format
• https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/pasting-an-excel-sheet-into-a-table-in-outlook/d4684d7c-64c7-4aa5-a372-8da1c78a2d45

Also, remember when answering to not just post a link but explain what your product is doing in a simple way. When you write a full description of the solution with your product, people are more likely to click the link and download your add-in.

In general a nice product, I have a similar product in mind I wanted to build (a bit different though) but I will follow you here :) Keep us updated

Excel tables look ugly :)

I have seen products that turn excel tables into something good looking.

I use to convert Excel spreadsheets into web apps and one complaint with Excel was how ugly it looked.

Thanks for sharing this Chris! Encouraging post and great how you reframe the significance of a PH launch as 1. a learning experience and 2. just one way to get out there not suitable for all products.

I don't think anything looks wrong with your posting or explaining what it does. My personal opinion is that even if it copies the HTML table perfect every client I've had wants tables to be extra fancy with filters, quick search, pinned columns, etc. That means pulling in a library to handle it and under the hood a lot of them don't use HTML tables due to the limitations.

I'm a developer so this isn't the best tool for me, but something that I could see being useful is an interface for creating structured data that could then be fed into your table library of choice. For economics and the enterprise, ag grid seems to be the standard and for my team we're always writing parsers to put it into JSON, save to the DB, and then put it in the grid.

Keep grinding!

I know the feel Chris. We're in the middle of ours now and we have not gotten to the first page yet. Our first PH launch of the open source initial version of our tool, which we did not even prepare for, someone we didn't know hunted it, got to #3. Now the one we worked really hard on and prepared for is not performing as well lol. Maybe they've changed their algorithm? What can you do....
here it is if you're interested https://www.producthunt.com/posts/servicebot-for-stripe-billing

Some feedback. Your icon is a bit boring for PH.

How many people build tables in Excel that they then have to move to HTML?

Can you add a feature, or a different use case, and launch again?

I think that your core users' feedback is what you should focus on.
When I launched https://www.joinsecret.com/ to help entrepreneurs save money for free on the best software, our early users feedback was amazing and we built on that.
What do people who actually used your product say? This is what is important I think.

To add to my previous comment...

1. How would someone who wants to convert their table to a webpage enter the code? I'm assuming they are just users of the webpage, not the one coding it
2. Can users edit the table after they convert it? Or do they have to create a new table to generate the new code?

I actually really like this. I'm not sure how this was done by the economist before your product, but I can see being able to run formulas in excel first, then transfer the output to a webpage would be perfect, and more convenient than previous tools. I'm not at all your audience so take it with a grain of salt...but I see how it could solve a problem