How to successfully launch on Product Hunt and become the Product of the Week?

This is Mert from UserGuiding team, and I want to share our experience with our Product Hunt launch.

We have launched the new version of UserGuiding on 16th of April and succeeded to be #1 Product of the Week.

Do you need a famous hunter for your launch?

In the article in their blog, Product Hunt answers this question with a “no”. Because your followers on Product Hunt won’t get notified when you “hunt” a product on PH.

So, if you already know someone, it’s quite okay to ask for getting posted. But don’t waste time for that, just hunt your product as PH says.

Lucky for us, we knew Kevin. He’s #1 Hunter on PH. I’m sure that getting posted by him helped us with our initial upvotes (which are very important, see the next section). You can reach Kevin and ask him if he can hunt your product.

Also, if you need to find hunters for your launch, you can check out this website: https://yvoschaap.com/producthunt/#hunt (Thank you Felipe for mentioning it!)

When should you post on Product Hunt?

The timing of Product Hunt is San Francisco timezone. So the earlier you hunt your product in this timezone, the more “initial upvotes” you’ll have when SF people wake up and see your product on top. That will result in more upvotes for your product and help you finish the day on top as well.

You can check this website that can help you when to launch on Product Hunt:
https://whattimeisitatproducthunt.com/

Our visual preparation for the launch

We’ve made a research on the products that have done a great job with their Product Hunt launch. Mostly, they had two things in common:

An eye-catching GIF as a thumbnail, and a cool video that explains the product.

Our magician designer Alican created both the GIF and video in a few days.

Other preparations on our website & product

I’ve prepared the embed code for Product Hunt badge before the launch so that we made it live a few seconds after launching.

Also, we’ve created a product tour on our website by using our own product and welcomed Product Hunt visitors.

We welcomed Makers with a product tour, created with our own tool.
We’ve set the targeting setting of this product tour so that only visitors from Product Hunt saw it. So our visitors immediately engaged with our product and proceeded to actually sign up if they were looking for such a product.

And lastly, we were limiting some features for our free trial users until they subscribe to one of our premium plans. We decided to remove all limits for all users so that Makers from Product Hunt can fully experience UserGuiding and share their feedback with us.

What happened on the launch day?

Kevin hunted UserGuiding 2.0 in 00:30 SF time on 16th of April, and we immediately activated Product Hunt badge & segmented product tour on our landing page.

We had a few upvotes before we even started announcing our launch to our network.

Now, time for sharing a post on different channels about our launch. Be careful here. Just like Product Hunt suggested in their article, we gave a direct link to the launch page in our posts but we asked for feedback, didn’t ask for upvotes directly.

Here are the channels where we asked people to join the discussion on Product Hunt:

-Reddit (/r/Startup_Ideas specifically. Because /r/startups is moderated by jerks, they only accept posts from their personal network),
-Y Combinator – Startup School forum,
-Hacker News,
-Linkedin & Facebook & Twitter,
-Slack channels,
-Facebook channels,
-Email to all users.

We already had assigned different channels to someone in our team, so every post was published in around 30 minutes after our launch.

Those initial upvotes & a great discussion on our post helped us reach the top spot – and we managed to stay there the whole day!

And finally…. What are the results of this success?

So, with our UserGuiding 2.0 launch, we managed to be;

-#1 Product of the Day (16th of April 2019),
-#1 Product of the Week (16th of April 2019)
-#3 Product of the Month (April 2019)

Here are some actual numbers from our Analytics:

Between 16th of April and 13th of May, we got 8677 visitors from Product Hunt.

We got included in the daily, weekly and monthly newsletters. Which led to lots of extra exposure, backlinks on various blogs, shares by influencers, and social media shares.

But most importantly, we had the chance to talk to lots of Makers from all around the world.

• 890 Makers signed up to UserGuiding,
• 160 Makers gave us amazing feedback to help us improve our product,
• 94 Makers took a product demo.

Of course, we are happy with the growth of our MRR. But more importantly, we feel very grateful for talking to so many amazing people in such a short time.

After more than a month, we are still getting lots of traffic with Product Hunt’s latest toy: timemachine.betamode.dev

Last words and some suggestions for your launch

Product Hunt is an amazing place to check out the latest products and share your product. Actually, it’s incredible that it’s free to submit on PH 👀

If you are an indie Maker or have a startup with low budget, Product Hunt is a very strong candidate to be the place that you can find your first users.

Don’t overthink about it and just launch.

If you have some income and have a good team, make some preparations to make a bigger leap.

And, get some coffee and food stock for the launch day. You’ll be talking to hundreds of people on that day!

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Originally posted in our blog at the bottom of this post.

Feel free to reach me and ask any questions & support.

Good luck to everyone on their launch!

#growth