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Lessons from hunting 50+ products on Product Hunt 🚀

Here are my top tips to those who are planning to launch their product on Internet's biggest product discovery platform: Product Hunt

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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:

  1. 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)
  2. Schedule the launch for 12:01 am PT (Product Hunt refreshes their feed at 12am PT)
  3. 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!)
  4. 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
    1. Upvote + Comment + Review
    2. Upvote + Comment
    3. Upvote
  5. 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)
  6. Tweet out a link to your product & get people to upvote
  7. 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
  8. Pick a Tuesday/Thursday for the launch (anecdotally works better)
  9. Respond to every single comment with 1 line of a meaningful reply (within a short time)
  10. 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)
    1. Compliment
      1. (ex: “Congrats on the launch, you’re awesome.”)
    2. Statement
      1. (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. ”)
    3. Statement + Thoughtful Question
      1. (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.