Does the number of upvotes on PH show the success of the product launch?

You can have a success on PH. Be the number 1 product of the day/week/month, get published in the newsletter but it does guarantee your product's success among your real user. With PH you can validate interest and gain some awareness but there is a long journey to go with your product to be considered a success.

I've had a few decent (but not stellar) PH launches that went well. PH is just weird in that they'll put an Airtable list of "Top Web3 Services for Making Your Own NFTs" up against some enterprise SAAS with $50 million in funding and someone's ebook. Success on PH isn't always an indicator of actual economic success, and SaaS, in particular, isn't something I think does well on there for a variety of reasons. That being said, I would still advise people to do a PH launch because it's an easy source of backlinks to help with SEO (always a good thing) and it could go really well and drive a lot of traffic, and some people do use PH like G2Crowd or Capterra where they'll look for services in curated lists that people create, etc. Bottom line: Because PH is not a traction channel, it will not make or break you.

welcome to the Hunt! looks like i'm already subscribed to your upcoming page. PH ranks products mostly by upvotes- they have an algorithm that can multiply points per upvote or divide them- such as a bunch of users signing up just to upvote, can do more harm than good. i'm launching on monday, check it out! producthunt.com/upcoming/trade-hub-3

I think it does not show the success of the product, however; it is possible to reach more people when you have more upvotes. The important thing is getting valuable feedbacks and reviews from the users who examine the product in detail.

I think the combination of upvotes, hunts, comments and discussions shows the launch's success.

I doubt

While it is necessary to be successful in many areas for a startup, I think one of these tasks is to be visible in the product hunt and to complete the day with high rankings for your product. This is a platform where many entrepreneur and investors can reach you. But of course, just getting upvotes isn't worth much, because there are people who do it using bots. The important thing is to get comments and support. Thus, you can both correct your mistakes and attract the attention of investors.

Of course not, still I think when you have more upvotes, you may gain confidence in your product, and who knows garner the eyes of an investor perhaps. PH strictly prohibits gimmicks to gain more upvotes. Rather one can politely request feedback and learn more about the product being more market-fir which keeps helping you to transform your product into a revenue-generating business.

The number of upvotes doesn't represent product success. It represents better community engagement