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Here’s My Product Hunt Guide

What is this?

A free 1-pager created by me (KP) to get to the signal among the noise around the topic of how to set up your Product Hunt launch for success.

These are just personal insights and learnings (don’t take it as gospel) distilled from my experience as a top hunter.

Who is this for?

Founders and creators who want to maximize their chances of success on Product Hunt on the launch day

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Quick Tip: None of these guarantee success but only point to the ways it has worked for the below makers. Always use your own intuition and judgment. That matters most in the end.

My Prior Experience:

I’m a top hunter on Product Hunt with over 3,400+ points, 8,900+ followers on PH and a total of 51 products hunted so far

  • Won the Golden Kitty for Best Community Member of the year 2021! 🏆 
  • Hunted 16 products since 2021, 8 of them ended up listing within the top 3 spots of day on Product Hunt [KP's PH Profile]

My top tips:

  1. Schedule the launch for 12:01 am PT (Product Hunt refreshes their feed at 12am PT)
  2. 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!)
  3. 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
  4. 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)
  5. Tweet out a link to your product & get people to upvote
  6. 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
  7. Pick a Tuesday/Thursday for the launch (anecdotally works better)
  8. Respond to every single comment with 1 line of a meaningful reply (within a short time)
  9. 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?”)

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Ask for support, not upvotes. (This is PH’s advice)

We ask that you not ask for upvotes, but instead ask the community to simply take a look for themselves. You can find more information on sharing your post on social media here.

ADDITIONAL READING:

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Dru’s tips

(Source here)

  1. Launch on Tuesday. Historically, Tuesday has the most votes. Even if you don't get #1 of the day. More people will see your product. If you want to get the product of the day and don't care about overall traffic. Launch on Sunday.
  2. Share the launch on Twitter, Indie Hackers, Slack, LinkedIn and your email list.
  3. Don't ask for votes. Ask for comments and reviews. The former gets you disqualified.
  4. Respond to comments. This factors into the algorithm.
  5. Get someone with a large following to hunt you. Their followers get an alert when they hunt a new product.

FUN TOOLS FOR YOUR LAUNCH DAY:

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WANT ME TO HUNT YOUR PRODUCT?