Chrome extension 
Product Hunt is the top site in the world for new startups to launch their products. Tens of thousands of products compete each year for the daily top prize: Product of the Day. And as the year goes on, every successful launch on Product Hunt eventually gets categorized into different groups. There are Design Tools, Developer Tools, Finance, and so on across 16 different categories.
Annually, the entire Product Hunt community across the globe votes for the top products of the year in those respective categories. In 2020, MarkUp was fortunate enough to bring home the top prize in its category. But before we dive into that and our launch this past year, here is some background on how we got there:
Before MarkUp, if you were a developer, designer, or PM working on websites at an agency, a SaaS product at a startup, or a landing page at an enterprise company, feedback was most likely a major issue. We’ve heard it from people in these roles and industries for years, and we’ve experienced it ourselves firsthand.
Teams and stakeholders would be taking screenshots and notes of every little change they wanted to make; nothing would be centralized or visual; redundant conversations abound.
When we built MarkUp, we had one mission in mind: make it incredibly easy for anyone across an organization to collaborate on any website or image. Upload. Comment. Share. All feedback stays transparent and hosted in one place.
MarkUp launched on Product Hunt in March 2020 with about 3,000 beta users. We came out of Product Hunt that month with 7,000 users, and today we’re on pace for 70,000 users by the end of this month.
When we launched on ProductHunt eleven months ago, we were nervous, because we knew MarkUp was far from perfect. Unsurprisingly, Intercom was overflowing with messages that day. It was mostly from new users about things not working: projects not loading, comments not sticking, invites not going through. While that was difficult, we learned a hell of a lot from those users and we were ultimately named Product of the Day! Most importantly, we received a ton of validation and thousands of new users to gain feedback from and with whom we could grow. Since then, we’ve adapted, we built new things, and we moved forward into a year of growth.
One thing our entire team will forever cherish about launching on Product Hunt was, quite literally, the hunt! It’s a 24-hour race in which thousands of products compete for the top spot. We kicked it off at 3am and were overwhelmed by the amount of support, both from early MarkUp users and the entire Product Hunt community. After trading the top spot with a Slack plug-in for most of the day, we stayed up until 3am the following day to see ourselves cross the finish line as Product of the Day. It was so damn epic! But we also had our work cut out for us.
In the days and months that followed, we’ve focused relentlessly on our mission by making the product more reliable, scalable, and performant, whether for a freelance designer working with one client or fifty people at an enterprise collaborating on new marketing collateral.
To our surprise, MarkUp was named a finalist for Product Hunt’s Developer Tool of the Year. A few days later, MarkUp ultimately won that top prize at the annual Product Hunt Golden Kitty Awards (yes, what a name!).
We are incredibly thankful for the Product Hunt community, our users, the Ceros family, and the entire MarkUp team. Tens of thousands of products go onto Product Hunt every year. To ultimately win Developer Tool of the Year is a testament to all of these driving forces behind MarkUp. We’re beyond excited for what we’ll deliver for you all in 2021.
With Gratitude,
The MarkUp Team,
