How we got PeerBoard to #1 product of the day on Product Hunt

Hey indie hackers!

This night we launched PeerBoard, our plug and play community platform, on product hunt. And while it may be a bit too early to jump to conclusions, I'd like to share some tips and tricks that helped us to get to #1, at least for now.

A bit more about PeerBoard. It's a discussion board engine built for the modern age and with a heavy focus on integrations with different CMSes and developer environments. We have our WordPress plugin and components for react/angular/node (more to come) - so you can put your discussion board right on your website, under the same login system, navigation, etc. And this way it becomes a natural part of your product with minimal friction to use.

It took us 11 months to get here, we bootstrapped and then raised a small pre-seed. Our team is mostly engineering now, focusing on core product and integrations. We love working with new partners so if you want to give it a try, just check https://peerboard.com and feel free to reach out to me directly in case of any questions or feedback (I'm @vernon99 both on Twitter and in Telegram).

To prepare for our Product Hunt launch, we did a few things in advance:

• Read Product Hunt's own guide, very much recommended
• Created a landing page on Product Hunt (with their "Ship" feature). This allowed us to start accumulating early followers in the way that a) highlights our potential PH launch, b) has the least friction for them to subscribe if they already have a PH account.
• We reached out to our 1st circle of connections on Linkedin, Facebook, etc and invited them to follow us on this page.
• Now a hard part: we started a community using our own product that lives on community.peerboard.com. While it is not very active as a community yet, there're a lot of silent readers who receive updates. And those are the people who care about our success because they already use our product. We also automatically add all new registrations to this community.
• We prepared quality screenshots, created a gif for the icon (a common recommendation) and wrote all the messaging in advance so we don't have to do it at midnight on the day of launch. PreviewHunt.com is a helpful resource to check how it will look and feel.

On the day of launch we:

• Activated our Ship landing page and sent the update to the followers
• Sent emails to the members of our product community.
• Sent messages to a bunch of Telegram groups for product people. It helped that our first prototype was for Random Coffee and we launched it with multiple Telegram groups, so we already provided value to them a while ago.
• Obvious things like doing Twi, Fb, LN posts.

Generally speaking, the best way is to start giving value to a large group of people as early as you can. So when you get back to them for help later, they have some appreciation of your work. I realize it's a chicken and egg problem - you launch on PH to get early adopters and it helps if you already have them :)

Check out PeerBoard on Product Hunt and let me know if you have any questions or feedback!

A quick update from the next day: we lost our position and ended up being #4 for that day. Also got dragged into bot wars: at some point we got 500 random upvotes out of the blue (not from our efforts), got penalized for that and took me to write Ryan to recover our position. 3 other submissions accelerated their pace a lot by the end of the day, we know for sure that 2 of them were using bots. Product Hunt is a war zone on Tuesdays, be aware.