On 19th May 2017, we were lucky to get 600+ upvotes on Product Hunt. It made us a Top Hunted product (meaning we were a Top 5 global product launch). More importantly, it meant we were showcased to the entire PH community as a Top Hunt.
We had over 3K+ installs that week from Product Hunt. Here’s exactly how we did it.
Product Hunt is the best 🎉
Product Hunt is one of the best ways to launch your startup for three reasons.
- It’s free. This is important when you’re a startup 🙂
- It’s a perfect way to qualify your idea
- PH has an awesome community. They support and positively critique your early-stage product. A great way to soft launch to great people.
You have one shot to get it right. We spent 10x more time planning then executing it. Get it right and it will be raining sign ups for weeks to come (Drag got 3K installs from our launch).
BTW, here’s how we did:
Our Product Hunt launch was a success, here it is.
We made it onto their daily newsletter, here it is.
Here’s our step-by-step guide.
Understand the Product Hunt community
Before you start anything, understand how Product Hunt works. Analyze successful strategies and reverse engineer them. It’s a great way to find the best way to launch, fast.
Google: ‘How to launch on Product Hunt‘
Look at the results. Read them all. Our article is just one of many ways to execute. Understand them, see what strategies universally work and which are best for you.
Create your PH plan
Have a clear plan before launch. There’s so much planning required to optimize your launch. Your plan should be simple. Here’s ours, it was ugly, it had typos, and it was made up of notes only, but it worked.
Looking back, I’d definitely make it a bit more robust. 🙂
Use this article as your reference (not our original notes above!). Here are the steps.
Find someone (high-profile) to Product Hunt you
Start with an unfair advantage. Find someone who’s active on Product Hunt and ask them to list your startup on your behalf. There are some big benefits, the biggest being you have an influencer on board, with an active following.
How do you find a Product Hunt influencer? Here.
Here’s what we did.
1. Decide who best fits your product
- How regularly do they list?
- How well do their historical Hunts fit your product?
- How much influence do they have (what’s their following/what type of following)?
- How many successes do they have with Top Product Hunts?
2. Start speaking to HuntersOnce you’ve selected the best people to list your product, start talking to them. Here’s our example outreach email:
To be extra clear, we also created a pdf that provides all the information needed for Hunters to make a decision on Drag (here’s one of the pages).
Plan a time and date to launch
Awesome news, you’ve found someone to list your product. Have a clear date to launch your product. Agree the best time for your Hunter to launch your product and work super-hard to have everything ready.
Everything needs to be timed perfectly on the day. Your first step is to work out the official day.
The run up to launch
Work out the channels to promote your product. The most important thing is to focus on driving people to the PH website, not just focusing your activity inside the website. This is one of the biggest factors to succeed.
Here are some people to ask for help 🙂
1. Early access usersFor us, we had a small and excited community who love Drag. We had built this over three months and had been regularly updating them on Drag’s progress. What this meant was that we had a willing audience to help Drag succeed.
2. Friends/families/otherYour own team can influence how PH activity on the day (call on everyone). Now is the time to ask for help from as many people as possible.
3. Technology influencers
Find technology influencers and reach out to them in advance of your launch day. If your product is exciting they may help and even be your biggest contributors. Create a daily quota and create an outreach process so you maximize how many tech folks you can contact. Hit your numbers every day in the run up to launch.
4. Your High-profile Product HunterDon’t forget him/her. Your Hunter can be a big help. They have an established following on Product Hunt and on other social channels. They can help your product explode.
5. Talk everywhere, to everyoneThere’s a lot of places you can talk. Find the best places. For us, it was Reddit channels, LinkedIn groups, Quora, and our own social networks.
The most important thing is to have a clear advanced plan. Start talking early to each channel, co-worker, friend, family and other. Find out how they can help and work together on a plan to execute so that maximum upvotes can be leveraged on the big day.
Create incentives to help
People will always help for free, but having incentives makes things reciprocal. Your timing is critical on your Product Hunt launch. Everyone that needs to help, needs to do it on the day of launch only, otherwise, it has little-to-no effect. Having a two-way thing helps ensure that it’s done the day you need it, with no delays.
For us, we offered a ‘special surprise’, if they upvoted us on Product Hunt. Tangibly, what that meant is that everyone who helped us, we planned to offer them early access to Drag Pro.
On the day
The big day is all about timing. The main bit of advice I can offer on the day is be available. Be available to answer questions on Product Hunt, be available to contact everyone to ensure your plan is being executed clearly and be available for some unforeseen events. For example, on the day, we had some big publications contact us, because they saw us on PH that day.
There’s a big impact if these things happen 24 hours too late.
Here are our results on the day.
Thanks for listening 🙂
Hey Nick, cool product :)
While I agree with a lot of what you're saying, there are a few statements I don't 100% agree with:
Asking friends and family for upvotes - Upvotes from people that literally just signed up for PH mean nothing, and actually signal that you are trying to game the system.
Find someone high-profile to hunt you - In the olden days, having a big time hunter meant a lot more. Now, it carries much less weight. However, there are still two super small benefits: 1) It sends a notification to all the hunter's followers, but I have found that it has very little effect on actually driving traffic to the post, and 2) it can add a TINY sprinkling of social proof.
The amount of time and effort people place into finding a hunter is insane though. For anyone reading this, you can hunt your own product yourself, or if you really want a hunter, you can send me a DM on Twitter and avoid spamming tons of people: https://twitter.com/daviswbaer
Source: I am currently the 235th ranked Hunter on PH.
Haha thanks for the frank response Davis!
I've never Hunted myself and really do attribute the success to Hunters of value, with leverage, influence (they can also help guide strategically how best you should/could be doing things).
I agree though, you should not spend lots of time finding one!
Great post. I think the #1 thing to ask yourself before launching on PH is:
Is my target customer segment contained within the PH community? If not, I'd argue that it's a big waste of time.
PH is a distribution channel like any other.
If you find just 1 sustainable, repeatable customer acquisition channel.. your product thrives. And because PH is not a repeatable channel it's an even riskier place to spend your time, money and effort on.
I'm curious... Has anyone ever seen a B2B app that averages $500/Month for subscription ever successfully launch on PH? I haven't. Curious as to why.
The audience is a very narrow slice of society
So you are saying that PH isn't meant for B2B applications of any substance? And that to be successful on PH you need to have smaller, less expensive applications?
What to do if your product was hunted by someone without your knowledge? That's basically what happened to https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mailist – someone (other than me, the founder) found it and published there. And I had no chance to react. Now I'm trying to prepare for an official release, fully moderated by me, but you said: "you have one chance". Any bits of advice on that?
Hey Marcin, I actually saw Mailist when it was hunted a few weeks back - cool idea :) I downloaded the Chrome extension, but to be honest, have forgotten to use it :/
Regarding your question, PH typically allows you to ask for a re-launch if your product was hunted without your knowledge. I would contact PH through their chatbox and ask for a re-launch.
Oh, thanks! Didn't know, definitely going to contact them! :)
Hopefully you start using Mailist, let me know if there is anything I could improve :)
Yeah, this happened to us twice! Contacting PH is your best bet!
I had a similar problem. You can launch alternate URLs. In our case, our website was one, our Chrome extension URL another.
This should help.
One other aspect of launching is you you need to maximize traffic to your PH page from whatever sources you have access to... so be it a company website or blog articles, they need to reference your project launch page.
You can use this widget
https://betapeak.com/tools/product-hunt-widget/
to embed your profile on your website/blog post and drive some additional traffic for your big day!
Hey! I've hunted a few hundred products, most have reached one of the top spots for the day. Feel free to reach out if I can be helpful! benlang.me
Hey Nick, nice guide and congrats on this launch.
I wondered, after reading this: "For us, we offered a ‘special surprise’, if they upvoted us on Product Hunt. Tangibly, what that meant is that everyone who helped us, we planned to offer them early access to Drag Pro."
How did you know who upvoted you ?
I mean, how can you match the upvoters in product hunt, to your own users ? Did you do this manually ?
Thanks,
Kevin
Hey Kevin, yes it was all manual! There's a dropdown in PH that helps identify who's upvoting :)
I always considered PH one the first places to promote a new product but it seems you already had a small but engaged following before going on there that really helped. It’s crazy how massive PH has grown and requires a proper strategy. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for sharing this level of detail about how you launched on Product Hunt. My biggest takeaway is that I need to spend time ASAP to plan out the launch for my project (www.tribefive.me) soon!
Can you share any insights about the three month period before you decided to launch on Product Hunt? You mentioned you focused that time on your early access users.
What was the turning point where you said, "okay now we want to go to Product Hunt?"
Haha good question. Honestly, I don't remember. I think it's important to run at least 3 months and time your PH launch well. Optimize when you're ready :)
How to hack being an Indiehacker, I like it.
Out of all the steps you listed, what do you think was the most crucial decision you made?
Build the best product you can! Traction can happen with no effort if you do this correctly. Aside from that, it's building an executable plan and following through with it.