Followup: 10 things I learned after our Product Hunt launch

Approx. 10 days ago, I posted an article "Product Hunt preparations" (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/product-hunt-preparations-3cee866f42).

We launched on Thursday 13.06 and long story short...got to #5! I promised a followup, so here it is:

10 things I've learned after partnerplace.io 's Product Hunt launch:

1. Expect not to do anything else that day - we had a schedule for the first part of the day, but the emotions were so high, it was impossible to get anything done for the whole day. I kept on refreshing, observing our stats all the time and making sure I don't miss any chances. I actually had 4 dashboards open at all times: PH, productwars, analytics and user.com which analyses all the traffic. I highly recommend the last one, as it helped me identify the traffic in a very detailed way.

2. Getting featured is...random? - PH has 2 lists: featured and all. The featured one gets a boost in traffic and "organic" upvotes, but it is not clear who picks the list. Once I saw some of the products had less upvotes and comments than us, I wrote politely to PH about it and asked if we can get there and they said yes. But it took them 4h.

3. GIF avatar doesn't matter - I've spent some time doing a GIF avatar, but I believe it doesn't matter. What matters most is having a visible avatar - we had one with a white background and it got lost. As soon as we changed it, we got more upvotes. You just need to be visible on the list. Bright colors and a nice design helps.

4. Design matters - We created images with a free Canva account. The company that reached #1 had B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L-L-Y created images and videos. No wonder they won - they definitely had a strong marketing team (apart from a cool product).

5. Prepare for tough love - I did not expect this, but we got one negative comment that went a bit like: "what's this sh*&, I can build a better one in a week". TBH - I welcomed the post as it allowed me to explain what we did for the last months, but I was definitely surprised to see it.

6. Having a mailing list of a thousand contacts would help amazingly well. Generally it is the first 30 minutes that counts. I saw that 7/10 companies who were top 10 at the beginning (based on productwars) were the top 10 at the end.

7. Having a partner helps - the first part of the day we worked together. The second part of the day, we took turns to make sure we do get some sleep. Prepare for an all-nighter.

8. Interestingly the competition was just as high at night than it was during the day. I guess it's a matter of timezones, but it never stopped/got lower.

9. People are generally impulsive - they do not read, they skim, they do not follow the expected path, they guess the way:) I had a meeting with one of the customers today who connected with me at 2:00 am his time, because he missed the option to take an interactive demo - I am very grateful, but it just shows that people are impulsive:)

10. It's not just about Product Hunt! - Seriously, this is the most important learning I got. PH it's just an excuse. Just the fact that you are posting on Linkedin/Twitter, everybody is supporting you, sharing your posts, etc gives you a lot of PR/marketing. We got 7 leads directly from PH and 3 from our network, because somebody saw a post about us and connected the dots.