Product Hunt Launch Story + Birth of Numtle*
Joining Product Hunt
I showed Claude the first user source/medium data from Google Analytics for Soosooland, and Claude pointed out that it was obvious I hadn’t been promoting the site at all — just relying on word of mouth. Claude suggested launching on Product Hunt.After joining Product Hunt, you’re not supposed to launch your product right away on the first day. Instead, you upvote other products — but not too many, around 5 a day is about right. I upvoted a Claude agent for finance. There was something called ChatGPT 5.4 Instant, so I gave it an upvote.There were so many products I didn’t understand, so I just upvoted ones with cute icons.
The Cat Icon Story
Product Hunt uses a cat face as its icon. Right now, the card buttons on the Soosooland platform have images drawn by ChatGPT. Cats have portrait rights too, so I thought it would be nice to put photos of our cats Mong and Zzini on the Soosooland card buttons someday. Or since stray cats don’t have owners to claim portrait rights, I could use photos of the neighborhood cats — Cheese, Cookie, Margarine, Butter, and Cookrius II. Just thinking about how cute and adorable that would be makes me want to fix it when I have time. Though I might be too busy to get around to it.Three Badges and Launch Prep
A few days passed. I earned 3 Product Hunt badges. Claude suggested it was time to launch Soosooland, so I scheduled it for a Tuesday.Launch Day — The Light and Shadow of Product Hunt
On the morning of launch day, I searched for Product Hunt and found quite a lot of complaints from people. One was that the system favors Indian users. The day resets at midnight US time, which is 4 PM in Korea and 7:30 PM in India. Product Hunt detects macro voting, so you can’t all gather in an office or at a party to vote together. But 7:30 PM in India is the perfect time for everyone to vote from home individually. Americans would be asleep at that hour. Since products are ranked by number of votes, getting early votes means less scrolling past competitors — a real advantage.293rd Place
By evening on launch day, it seemed like about 1,000 products had launched that day. They’re listed in order of votes received, and I got 2 votes by asking family members — which put me at 293rd place. I recorded a video of it, which I’ll attach below. After the daily count ends, Soosooland can’t be discovered on Product Hunt without a direct link.
Click the button to visit Soosooland on Product Hunt.
If you’re a Product Hunt member, an upvote would mean a lot!
If you’re a Product Hunt member, an upvote would mean a lot!
Things I Discovered on Product Hunt
I spent some time searching through games on Product Hunt. Many had beautiful characters and game screens. I spotted Wordle with a medal.I came across Pyramid Solitaire, and it reminded me of how I came up with Numzzle. It’s a story worth putting in Section 1.5 of Numzzle Devlog Episode 1. A friend showed me a solitaire card game they played with hwatu (Korean flower cards) — laying them all out, calculating each month as a number, adding them up to make 20, and setting aside the used cards. Numzzle was created by combining number cards with operation symbol cards, but it took a long time to get the copyright registered. The copyright association investigated for a long time, probably because they thought something similar might already exist. But it was eventually registered.
Inspiration From Another Game
I tried another game on Product Hunt. The first round I cleared it just by pressing what it told me to. But from the second round on, I kept failing. After about 5 rounds I thought, “this game is badly made” — but then hours later it was still on my mind. “How was I supposed to solve it?”And then it hit me. “Numtter is too easy. I need to make it harder.” Instead of only drawing 1 card when a turn fails, I decided to add radio buttons so players could draw 2 or 3 cards. And since a small target number makes the game too easy, I added an input field so players could set the starting number to 99. I asked Claude to update the code and push it to GitHub. It looked fine on iPad during testing, but on the phone it needed scrolling, so I mentioned to Claude that we’d need to add a Korean/English toggle.
Birth of Numtle
But then a completely new game idea popped into my head. Claude got excited and said let’s forget the toggle for now and make the new game right away.The name came to me too — Numtle.
In Numtter, if you succeed you don’t draw cards. But in Numtle, if you succeed your cards get refilled. In Numtter, finishing quickly means you’re good. In Numtle, lasting longer means you’re good. I named it imagining a vaulting horse (뜀틀 in Korean) — and since it’s Numtter’s little sibling, “Numtle” fits perfectly.Here’s what I said to Claude at the time:
Soosoo: Start with 5 lives, and if you pass 5 times the game ends. Passing doesn’t give you extra cards — instead, when you use cards they get refilled by the same amount. Let’s set the modes in advance: 1. Addition and subtraction 2. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. When all 5 lives are used up, the game ends. The reason the game is called Numtle is because it feels like stacking one more level each time you clear a hurdle on a vaulting horse. What English words have “tle” in them? Little? Turtle? They’re all cute. Oh, and importantly — save the records and show “You are currently ranked Nth.”
Claude: I’ll call it NUMTLE in English.
Numzzle was already being saved to Firebase, so it seemed like we could just save Numtle there too.
Soosoo: Before we build it, we should check if a similar game already exists.
Claude: (after searching)
There are some similar games out there, but Numtle’s unique elements are clear. Existing games have random target numbers or are multiplayer, whereas Numtle combines an ever-increasing solo challenge starting from 1, a life system, automatic card refills, and rankings — more than enough to stand apart.
Save data to Firebase
Numzzle was already saving to Firebase, so I thought we could use that. Claude coded it and we tested it several times. It wasn’t saving, so the code needed fixing — but the chat had gotten so long that Claude was struggling. So I started a new chat and asked again, and we got the record saving working properly.Claude coded it and I tested it multiple times. The saving wasn’t working and we needed to fix the code, but the chat had gotten so long that Claude was struggling. So I opened a new chat and got it fixed there.
Soosoo: All fixed. Guess who told me how?
Claude: Who told you? 😄
Soosoo: Claude did — in a different chat window. This one got too long, maybe your head got fuzzy.
Claude: Haha, so you asked me and then heard it from me again! When conversations get too long I sometimes lose track of earlier parts. Glad it’s sorted! Is it working now?
Soosoo: Yep, working great. Data’s being added and the ranking is showing up.
Claude: Nice work! We knocked out Numtle in a day 😄
Wrapping Up
We didn’t manage to get much attention for Soosooland on Product Hunt, but we got inspired by another product and knocked out Numtle in no time. There were still games I’d planned to make after finishing the Moeum School word pool work — and then we went and made an unplanned new game on top of that. I added Numtle to the Soosooland platform with a 🌱 emoji next to “new game” and placed it 4th on the list.On May 15th in a single day, I added a hard mode to Numtter and built Numtle. By the time I finished upgrading the sitemap and README, it was past midnight. In the Soosooland newspaper, I wrote Numtle’s birthday as May 16, 2026. 🌱
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