Chris Payne

Chris Payne

Building systems for the future of work!

About

Founder at Elevate Beyond. Building operating systems for managers, executives, and networks. Product design learner and systems nerd.

Badges

Tastemaker
Tastemaker
Tastemaker 5
Tastemaker 5
Gone streaking 10
Gone streaking 10
Gone streaking
Gone streaking
View all badges

Maker History

  • AspectOS
    AspectOSPurpose-built for the manager-employee relationship
    Mar 2026
  • 🎉
    Joined Product HuntFebruary 26th, 2026

Forums

Product Huntp/producthuntAaron O'Leary

18d ago

🔥 Get more points by launching on Alpha Day

We re trying something new on Thursday: Alpha Day.

The idea is simple. If this is the first time you re launching your product anywhere, you can tag it alpha and get a boost to your points (and land on a special leaderboard).

How do you survive the "Afternoon Slump" and build a Day 2 tail? 📉🏃‍♂️

Hey Product Hunt community,

We launched AspectOS today, and the "Marathon" phase has officially set in. We re currently stuck at #42, and while the early feedback on our UI has been incredible, the midday lull is hitting hard. Hitting 'Publish' was the easy part. Now, I m looking to the veterans who have turned a slow afternoon into a Top 20 finish, and those who kept the fire burning into the rest of the week.

We had the worst launch in Product Hunt history - but we went #4. Here's what happened.

Honestly launched this past Monday and we ended up Top 4 with 350+ upvotes and 40+ comments. It doesn t feel real, because:
1. The support we received from hundreds of strangers across the internet was incredible, and we are beyond grateful for it.
2. We didn t plan this launch. At all.

We ve been so deep in building the product that we kept pushing our launch back again and again and again. All of a sudden, on Monday we woke up to dozens of Congrats on the launch! messages. In our pre-coffee, foggy brained states we were really confused as to why. But then it hit us: we forgot to change our launch date.
To make matters worse, we didn t have any of the essentials: No hunter, no maker comment, no demo video (added in midday). There was just a placeholder of v0 materials we already iterated upon internally countless times. Our logo was even outdated, and the link to our product and website was nowhere to be found in the comments. Not one upvote or comment came from anyone we knew within the first hours of launching.
Because our day wasn t crazy enough, the website broke, so most businesses couldn t fill out our interest form properly, and our consumer facing Chrome extension encountered a huge bug where users couldn t use our product after installing it.
A situation like this usually means guaranteed failure, yet to our surprise, we climbed to a Top 5 position on the leaderboard and were swarmed with PH notifications all day. Even outside of Product Hunt we were being battered with notifications.
We re extremely thankful for the outcome, especially considering the circumstances. This is not a scenario that happens often, but it proved something vital to us:
Even with a shell of a launch, we re making something people want.

We always believed finding real, trustworthy reviews online mattered. But this experience made it clear it s not just important, it s necessary. As AI-generated content continues to blur the line between real and fake, the need for verified, authentic opinions is clear. That s the mission we re pursuing with Honestly.

View more