A story behind our Product Hunt launch
As many of you here, we went for a launch on Product Hunt😼 Learning from YC Startup School, we can launch multiple times, so we gave it a shot for our Growth Library prototype https://growthchannel.io/growth-library/
So we started with preparation...
🗓️ Few weeks before, we started preparing all the marketing materials: social posts, emails, community posts, created a GIF, intro video, PH description, tagline & maker comment. We read through some great case studies to make sure we were going for success. Here are our top picks:
🔖 How to Launch on Product Hunt (by Product Hunt): https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt-7c1843e06399
🔖 Checklist for Launching on Product Hunt (by Taskable): https://www.notion.so/Checklist-for-Launching-on-Product-Hunt-c282188c52474d0d9d8c0ffb7e26de64
🔖 How I got 2,000 new subscribers from Product Hunt (by Marketing Examples): https://marketingexamples.com/conversion/product-hunt
Everything seemed to be ready for the launch...
We scheduled our Product Hunt launch for Friday 00:01 (research stated good engagement between Friday and Sunday).
🔈F ew days before launch, we sent a newsletter and announced Growth Library launch on social media and our blog (https://medium.com/marketing-innovation-growth-hacking/introducing-growth-library-a-personalised-marketing-directory-for-startups-smbs-5887687d1a60), tagging all our partners and companies listed within Growth Library, which gave us great exposure and traffic!
🚀 On Friday, right at the launch, we went ahead for the second wave of (actual launch) promotion:
- added Product Hunt widgets on the website
- added Hello Bar to the website
- sent email announcement
- social posts on company pages
- announcement across Facebook groups
🔖 SaaS Marketer https://www.facebook.com/groups/384650048903273/
🔖 SaaS Founders and Execs https://www.facebook.com/groups/803865079768851/
🔖 YCombinator Startup School https://www.facebook.com/groups/318146255629697/
🔖 SaaS Revolutionaries https://www.facebook.com/groups/1690715704312909/ - announcement across Slack groups: Product Led Growth, Real Startup Hours, Indie WorldWide, Launch, Startup Study Group, Maker's Kitchen, Growth Hacker Talk
- direct messages to all relevant contacts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Slack, Skype, Telegram & Discord
With all this effort, we got nearly 70 upvotes. But that was not enough... We checked back on the homepage, we weren't there... So we messaged the Product Hunt community to see what went wrong. The response was simple from them - Listing are rarely featured... We were shocked 😵 With all that effort, we expected to get at least to the top 10 of the day. Few hours later, we made it to 100 upvotes, but also got great comments and engagement on the launch posts across the social networks and PH itself.
All in all, it was still worth it!
💫 108 upvotes
💫 150 subscribers (funny enough, more than the upvotes)
💫 nearly 1000 daily site visits
💫 and great feedback!
We plan our next launch in a few months when our actual "product" goes live so we can get the necessary exposure of the PH community.
Did you launch a "Listing" on Product Hunt before? How did it go?
Thank you for such a detailed insight! Really helpful
Congrats! I love postmortem style posts like this. Thanks for sharing. I'm curious how you found Hello Bar? I'm building a similar tool and would love if you'd be willing to try it out next time you launch 😊
I'm closely following Neil Patel and all his creations, so HelloBar is a given :) I also tried Convertflow but wasn't too impressed with it. Happy to give it a shot with your tool, let me know the link! ;)
That would be awesome if you want to take a look. I’d really appreciate your feedback! You can take a look here: https://newclick.io/
BTW, Neil is great and HelloBar is a solid choice :) I haven’t heard of convertflow, will definitely check it out. If you need any help feel free to email me or send a DM on Twitter ☺️
Will give it a shot!
P.S. your site has got responsiveness issues while I was browsing in Safari on MacOS, have a look!
Thanks! I think I see what you mean, but can you elaborate on the issues you experienced?
Ecommerce Promotions & Product Launch sections are not displaying right on homepage. Same issue appears on Examples page
dang it, everyone tryna get on the listing. lol
Thanks 😃. This was really a great read.
We are working on Feature Monkey (https://featuremonkey.com) currently and a bit confused about when should we launch it on ph. Should it be after acquiring some customers or there should be some other checklist?
Looking forward for some suggestions.
If you're unsure about the public launch, you can list it on Upcoming directory! This way you can also get more subscribers and beta users even before launching your product publicly. A good tip there is to import your existing subscribers to upcoming listing, so that way you will have more credibility as it will show the total number of subscribers you already have (kinda like upvotes).
Here's a good checklist to follow which has helped us a lot in preparation:
https://www.notion.so/Checklist-for-Launching-on-Product-Hunt-c282188c52474d0d9d8c0ffb7e26de64
Good luck! Let me know when you launch, will be happy to upvote :)
Thank you. This will be helpful. Will let you know when we will launch