10% of New Product Hunt Launches Contain Spelling Mistakes
Spelling issues are never the first thing people think about when launching a product. But through my research, I found out that about 10% of landing pages on Product Hunt have some kind of spelling mistakes and some of them were pretty noticeable, i.e. in CTAs, feature descriptions.
Getting people to use Spelltastic and discover it is an ongoing challenge, plus prior experience with existing spell checking tools leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
So as a first step, I wanted to know the scale of the problem. But where to start? Who should I ask? Which landing pages should I scan? Eventually, I decided to scan new Product Hunt launches. As these people should be eager to get feedback on their landing page.
The Process
- Process was fairly straightforward. First I wrote a script to fetch the latest products launched on Product Hunt (can be done by parsing the RSS feed). Then I wrote a script to fetch landing page URLs for those products and stored them in a csv file.
- I decided to not move the spelltastic engine out of the core NextJS application code, as it was already working and I didn't want to deal with the complexity of moving it out. So I wrote a puppeteer script to open Spelltastic (locally), submit the URL and get the results. Thus testing the entire product end-to-end in the process.
- Then opened the local DB file (sqlite) and ran a simple SELECT query to get all the landing pages which had at least one spelling mistake.
Key Findings
- •10% of landing pages had at least one spelling mistake
- •5% had critical issues that could significantly impact branding and trust (IMO)
- •80% of the affected landing pages were from founders who are not native English speakers (just like me)
- •
Spelling Mistakes Found On Different Landing Pages
Here are few mistakes that I found on different landing pages. These screenshots are taken from the Spelltastic report of the page. (Not sharing easily identifiable products for obvious reasons)
Next Steps
For the pages where I found spelling mistakes, I am reaching out to the people over X to let them know about the issue. But unfortunately, Twitter might be putting some restrictions on my account and might consider it as spam. So far only 1 person has responded, but they responded pretty positively, so I am optimistic that this will work out eventually.
A founder's response after I notified them about spelling mistakes on their landing page
Want to check your landing page for issues?
Use Spelltastic to scan your product page before launching. It's free and takes less than a minute.
Check Your Page Now