69 Upvotes and 4 Sales - My Product Hunt Strategy with no followers

Hey everyone,

I have been working on Stock Market GPT for almost a month. After multiple improvements to our AI systems and the addition of Stock Comparison AI, I was ready for the Product Hunt launch.

Before The Launch - The Pivot

Recently, I had seen that a lot of successful launches on Product Hunt were because of the social brand the founder had built over the years. Unfortunately, I had none.

All my pervious launches have been failures or okayish at best. So naturally I didn't have much expectations from this one. The product was looking good and at this point I also had 1 paying user. So I knew there were people willing to use it.

I have written about my experience on how I made an important pivot that brought in the paying user before the product hunt launch.

In summary - I removed the free tier and instead provided users a 7 day FREE trial.

Launch Preparations

The decision to launch was made. The date was set - 11th March.

I didn't have any audience. But I did know what increases the odds of success for a product hunt launch - launch assets and content.

I decided to put my efforts into creating eye catchy launch assets that conveyed the product offering and positioning. Here's an example -

Along with this, I put efforts into the launch description and the main comment for launch to make sure the small portion of people who do see my launch check out the product and upvote.

The Launch Day

The day had arrived. I decided to share the launch on all my socials. Though I didn't have any audience, even if I get 1 upvote it's a great help.

https://x.com/0x_gautam/status/1767105640550293957?s=20

Next, I needed to bring as much traffic as possible to the launch. This is where I strategically planned to use Indiehackers and Reddit.

If you look closely at the post where I shared the pivot and the milestone of getting 1st customer, it was published on the day of launch. I know for a fact that folks on Indiehackers and Reddit like to learn about how anyone got their first customer and what pivots helped a product. Such stories can get us useful ideas on that we can implement in our own products.

So, I was confident that the post where I share learnings and milestones will get good traction. So I published the post on launch day and at the very end added a section regarding the product hunt launch.

This indeed helped me get the traffic and the initial upvotes to get featured on the home page. Once on the home page, the product received the organic upvotes thanks to the efforts I put into the assets and content around the launch.

Results & Conclusion

The launch ended with 69 upvotes and we finished 15th on the launch day. Not the best numbers but still good enough.

In total we received 300+ unique visitors that resulted in 4 subscription sales. A good return for a day's effort.

In conclusion, I would say not to overthink your Product Hunt launch. It is a good platform get an initial spike in traffic and see the traction to keep you motivated.

Long term, I am working on SEO and landing page optimization along with product updates. Hopefully this is just a small event in the product's lifetime.

Thanks for reading this through! I hope it was worth your time. I would love to learn about your experiences with Product Hunt.

Thanks!