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๐Ÿ“How our Reddit marketing tool won #1 product of the day and #2 product of the week on Product Hunt

Hey everyone! ๐Ÿ‘‹
I'm Nikola, the co-founder and CEO of Howitzer!

A week ago, we won the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, and later a #2 Product of the Week (although we had 85 more upvotes than the #1).

I wrote a blog post, giving a first-person view of the whole process and the whole journey, providing some useful tips & tricks and some resources that helped us prepare for the launch.
I also stated the results and statistics we got from the Product Hunt launch, and analyzed them in the post.

https://blog.howitzer.co/how-our-reddit-marketing-tool-won-1-product-of-the-day-on-product-hunt

I hope this will be useful for everyone planning to launch on Product Hunt!

Let me know if you have some questions, will be more than happy to help you!

posted to Icon for group Product Hunt
Product Hunt
on April 8, 2022
  1. 1

    Insightful

  2. 1

    Congrats, this is super useful. Thanks for sharing your experience. ๐ŸŽ‰

    1. 1

      Glad that it's helpful Lucas! :)

  3. 1

    Congrats,
    Not so many tools focusing on Reddit, this is a very nice and useful tool.

    1. 1

      Thank you!

  4. 1

    Congrats! I'll try it for sure

  5. 1

    Hey Nikola, thank you for sharing it here. Your website is just great!

    Could you please share what software you use for showcasing your product videos on your homepage? Thank you!

    1. 2

      I paid a freelancer to animate them for me, in Adobe After Effects. Want a contact?

      1. 1

        Nice work - Could you please send me the contact? Thank you in Advance!!!

  6. 1

    I really loved it. @sachinNeravath Bookmark this post.

  7. 1

    Congratulations! Thanks for sharing your experience with us

  8. 1

    Awesome post Nik and a couple of really good links. Thanks for sharing!

    1. 2

      Glad you like it! :)

  9. 1

    Congrats, this is super useful. Thanks for sharing your experience. ๐ŸŽ‰

    1. 1

      Thanks, glad you like it! :)

  10. 1

    Congrats, glad your launch went well.

    1. 1

      ๐Ÿ™

  11. 5

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 2

      How do they prevent violating the TOS?

    2. 1

      Thanks a lot for your words, Manuel!
      I completely agree with you! I'm a redditor myself, and I love Reddit - truly love and care about it.
      We are completely aware that this is a huge problem, and we are working towards addressing it.
      What we do and are going to do to address this as much as possible:

      1. Educating people. We are building a base of Reddit marketing experts who would be educating people on how to target the right people and how to write non-spammy messages. Howitzer is built for delivering value to the people asking for it, at acale. Not for spamming.
      2. Cooldown period. A redditor cannot be messaged more than 2-3 times per month with a message sent through Howitzer.
      3. If a redditor responds negative to this kind of messages, we'll blacklist him and he will never receive this kind of messages
      4. Premium Reddit accounts won't be receiving messages through Howitzer. By paying Reddit they are helping with it's revenue and even Reddit doesn't show them ads, why would we be?
      5. Won't be able to send a link in the first message. You have to get a (positive/I'm-interested-type-of) reply first to be able to send a link
      6. Banning spammers from Howitzer. If you don't follow our guidelines and you are spamming people, we're shutting your account down

      These are some of the things we have done and are working towards. Please feel free to add some new ideas, as we would love to protect Reddit as much as possible, and provide a real value to the marketers at the same time.

      1. 1

        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

        1. 2

          Thanks for your ideas, Manuel!

          Sure, completely agree with this. We've been discussing this internally and concluded that everything starts from the inside - deciding some core values for the team and the company.
          First, we defined what spam means for us. Spam is sending messages that won't bring value to the target group, messages that are poorly written or scammy, messages to people who won't have the benefit or be interested in the topic, and finally - conversations that start by sharing external links in the first message.

          We decided that no matter how much someone is paying, we won't allow spamming. This means that the Enterprise customers (people able to send 500+ messages a day) need to explain their use case and their marketing strategy, so we'll make sure that they won't be spamming.
          We started implementing this by adding an onboarding form to learn more about the customer and his business, in case they want to go for the Enterprise plan.

          1. Completely agree that we need to stick to these values, and we'll give our best to stick to them.

          2. Regarding the 'providing an option for the Redditors to contact us and report some things or influence our roadmap' -> an awesome idea. We'll be opening a public community for growth hackers (sponsored by Howitzer), so maybe we can pull something like this directly into it. Would love to hear more ideas on this topic (maybe a community wouldn't be doable and a contact form would be more suitable?).

          3. Regarding the detection of interested/not-interested replies -> we already have implemented an auto-tagging system in Howitzer. When you receive a reply from the lead you've contacted, we try to calculate if he's interested to purchase your product, and add a label to that conversation.
            We have a custom AI model that detects this, trained on all of the conversations done through Howitzer. I can add my CTO here to discuss more on this topic, if you (or anyone else) have any additional questions.

          Thanks a lot for your input! ๐Ÿค˜
          It's really helpful, and I've documented these ideas in our Notion!

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