Here are my top tips to those who are planning to launch their product on Internet's biggest product discovery platform: Product Hunt
Today’s key learning is about Product Hunt 🚀
First off, a little background on my Product Hunt experience. I’ve been a long time supporter and fan of PH over several years. My account is listed as a top hunter on Product Hunt with over 3,500+ points, 9200+ followers on PH and a total of 56 products hunted so far!
Brief summary of my Product Hunt key milestones:
- Won the official PH Golden Kitty for Best Community Member for the year 2021! 🏆
- Helped tons of startups reach a top 5 spot, helped 5 clinch Product Of The Day spot, a few reach Product Of The Week and Month and assisted 1 reach Product Of The Year (yes, that’s Softr!)
Over these years, I’ve developed a strong intuition and learned insights on what is likely to work and what doesn’t.
Here are my top 10 tips for a successful Product Hunt launch:
- Create a PH account for yourself and all your team members at least 1 month ahead (it’s just a good practice if you’re a PH regular)
- Schedule the launch for 12:01 am PT (Product Hunt refreshes their feed at 12am PT)
- Hustle to get at least 20-30 upvotes by 5 am PT (ask your friends, email people you trust and will vouch for your product genuinely!)
- When asking your friends/close circle, aim to get reviews, comments and upvotes (descending order of importance) which anecdotally have a higher value per PH algorithm
- Upvote + Comment + Review
- Upvote + Comment
- Upvote
- Segment your email audience into 2-3 batches and email them through the day (so they don't all upvote within the same window which might seem spammy)
- Tweet out a link to your product & get people to upvote
- Please do things that don't scale and personally DM 5-10 high profile Twitter accounts in your niche to RT or preferably quote RT the main launch tweet
- Pick a Tuesday/Thursday for the launch (anecdotally works better)
- Respond to every single comment with 1 line of a meaningful reply (within a short time)
- Given all things equal, here is how I’d rank the quality of a comment from your audience (least valuable to PH to most valuable)
- Compliment
- (ex: “Congrats on the launch, you’re awesome.”)
- Statement
- (ex: “As someone who constantly forgets to buy crypto each month, I’ve enjoyed how easy it is to set up and automate my crypto purchases with your recurring payments feature. ”)
- Statement + Thoughtful Question
- (ex: “As someone who constantly forgets to buy crypto each month, I’ve enjoyed how easy it is to set up and automate my crypto purchases with your recurring payments feature. What is a new feature on your roadmap you are most excited about in the next 6 months?”)
Note: These are just personal insights and learnings (don’t take it as gospel) distilled from my experience as a top hunter.
Thank you for reading and giving me a piece of your attention!
PS: If you are planning a huge Product Hunt launch for your product and need my help as a hunter, hit reply and let me know. Or reach out to me directly on my DMs on Twitter. I get pitched a lot but I hand-pick 4-5 launches a month where I can genuinely add value and make sure I amplify those across my 40,000+ audience and growth channels.