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Email Validator! – 281 votes at ProductHunt, why? results and what’s next?

Email Validator! got 281 votes and was featured at Product Hunt. Huge increase of visits, great feedback and new plans for next API release.

This is the true story of a mini  Free API that people loved ♥ and how will get bro-awesome.

Last Sunday I posted my last mini project on ProductHunt. I shared as I do normally on twitter and on PH because I thought maybe someone will find it useful. They featured it after few hours, this means gets in the home page of tech for the day.

It’s not the first time one of my products it’s been on product hunt. We got Open Classifieds with 11 votes and more recently Yclas with 112 votes and also featured.

What I could never have expected is to be in the front page and get 281 votes. :O

Product_Hunt

 

Why??

It took me an approximate work of 1 hour since most of the code was done and I was using it since long time ago, decided to do a refactor to keep the list of disposable emails updated, few lines of code + a Free super simple API in PHP shared and Open Sourced.

People loved it . I mean surely it’s really useful for me, as said we use it everyday, never expected this reaction. I guess simplicity, been free and something that hurts many business is what happened.

Someone complained:

so writing 40 lines of PHP code is all it takes to get Hunted ?

And got a great answer:

You don’t know anything about the world today if you think complexity measures a great product
I was actually really disappointed at the beginning (can read here), how something that took me so little effort had such great success? Why Open Classifieds which I’ve been involved since 2009 spent thousands of hours of work got only 11 votes? My teammates were amazed but same time pissed. We work really hard for this products like Yclas which got 111 votes and was featured but not with this result.
Now I am thinking this is bringing a new opportunity to feel a gap that seems was not properly done before, found many alternatives but most of them paid and not Open Source. So now I am happy and I will try to see where this can go (my wife and newborn are going to kill me).

After Hunt Result

Results from been featured at product hunt
analytics

  • 29 comments (I think half are mine), with great feedback.
  • Received 1615 sessions in 1 day.
  • Mentioned on twitter more than 30 that I could count.
  • 72 stars on github
  • Featured at wwwhatsnew which brought 224 visits.
  • Got at least 5 spammers offering me services (paid services) into my inbox, rest went directly to spam folder. Quite annoying.

What’s next

I am planning to improve it, actually I had it in mind but with the great feedback I got I plan to release a better API that provides more info, keep it free and hosted at github.

  • Create an API  to report bounce emails, spam domains and spam email addresses. Only for trusted companies, will be under request and discussed with project collaborators which companies can have access to the API. This companies will be publicly displayed so there’s no questions asked.
  • Get a domain name, something cool and redirect requests there.
  • Improve current API and return a risk score, the API will still return TRUE/FALSE a message and a new field called risk score. Depending on the score if you get TRUE you can decide if you want to add it or not depending on your business.
  • Check if you emails it’s been pwned and give more risk score.
  • Check for misspelled domain names. Need to check how to do this still. Collaborative list on GitHub?
  • API to whitelist your email address. This will improve the risk score of the account, probably we will send an email to verify the account exists and ask to validate with a social network. Need to think about it.
  • jQuery plugin (or collaborate in a popular one) to use the validation directly in our forms.
  • Get a new design, something really simple like now, but cleaner 😉
  • Get a sponsored server Digital Ocean, Vultr or Inmotion will help for sure.
  • There’s not going to be any limit in the API usage while we get the free servers.
  • Go back and release it again on PH!

I need collaborators! Are you in?

Please contact me here.

Any feedback questions improvements feel free to comment. Thanks!