How We Prepared for Our Second Product Hunt Launch (and What Turned Out to Be the Hardest) 🚀

Six months ago, I came up with the idea to launch iPNOTE on Product Hunt again, and it’s already four years after our first launch. I was excited to get started, because during the first launch I wasn’t the one leading it, and I had zero knowledge of how to prepare effectively. So the very first thing I did was research.

I read about 20 articles on how to run a launch. My goals were:

• To figure out how to do it myself,
• To do it as effectively as possible,
• And hopefully to get Product of the Day.

The two most valuable resources I found were:

1. The official Product Hunt guide
2. A collection of founder case studies, where they shared their experiences (unfortunately, this resource is unavailable right now, but it may come back, so I’ll leave it here, in case it’s useful for you too.

After analyzing all the available information, I felt a mix of emotions. On one hand, I was inspired by the many success stories from founders: some grew their customer base dramatically, some found investors, some got PR coverage, others landed great collaborations.

But right after that inspiration came frustration. Almost everyone said the same thing: if you want strong results, you need to put in a lot of work and dedicate 2–3 months to preparation. In the beginning, I had planned to spend just a couple of weeks:)

On top of that, there was so much information and so many recommendations that my head was spinning. I didn’t want to miss anything in a rush, so I created a detailed checklist and asked my team to help with the preparation. As you can imagine, for a founder of a mature startup, a launch is far from being the top priority.

My checklist had over 60 tasks. Together with the team, we started working through them step by step.

I broke the preparation down into several steps:

STEP 0
This step included several scattered tasks that needed to be done in parallel with other prep work. I paid special attention to:

1. Creating and warming up Product Hunt accounts for team members and our support team.
   This is critical because:

• Votes from accounts created less than 7 days before the launch don’t count.
• Not all votes carry the same weight. The more Kitty points a user has, the stronger their vote.
• Kitty points only start accumulating from day 8 after registration. Even if you’re super active during the first week (commenting, supporting launches, joining discussions), it doesn’t matter, because no points are credited during those first 7 days.

So, I had to create a whole process for quickly gaining Kitty points (yes, we really had to do this).

2. Finding communities and groups for support on Product Hunt, and subscribing to them.

Some groups require moderator approval, which can take time. It’s also recommended to be active, friendly, and supportive in these communities. But I decided not to rely too much on them, because, unfortunately, many people only show activity before their own launch and then mute the groups afterwards.

3. Creating a content plan for social media and media outlets.

STEP 1
This step was about preparing content for the Product Hunt launch page. In our case, we also decided to update our website homepage to fully reflect our product.

These points are standard and can be found in the official PH guide. The only thing I’d emphasize is the importance of competitive analysis. Unfortunately, there aren’t many great LegalTech cases to look at, so I just analyzed successful launches in general. I studied the correlation between launch day and the number of upvotes, the number of comments, slogans, descriptions, whether they had video, and what their landing pages looked like.

This exercise helped me figure out how to present our product and gather ideas for visuals.

STEP 2
Finding a hunter. Almost every founder advises launching with a hunter. Following this advice, I made a list of hunters who had supported successful launches, found their emails, and wrote to them.

Some didn’t respond, others replied with automated messages selling consulting on how to prepare for a launch. One hunter did agree to support us, actually, it was the same one we worked with during our first launch.

We agreed on a launch date of April 15. But at that time, we faced a number of serious challenges in the company. To put it briefly, we were in a tight financial situation and had to prioritize finding an investor.

So I put the launch prep on pause until we solved that problem.

Once we successfully raised a round, resources freed up for the launch again. I revisited the hunter question and realized something: even top-5 hunters sometimes have failed launches with only 100 upvotes or less. At the same time, some launches without a hunter get over 600 upvotes.

You can draw your own conclusions, but I decided to try this time without a hunter. Tomorrow we’ll see if that was a mistake or the right call, since I won’t have to reschedule dates again after a 6-month pause.

STEP 3
Final touches before the launch:
Writing posts for social media and the email newsletter

Collecting a contact list of people the whole team will reach out to on launch day to ask for support and feedback

Preparing a clear instruction set for the team and distributing responsibilities

STEP 4 & 5
These are the tasks to do on launch day itself and immediately after. Since we haven’t done them yet, I won’t describe them now. I’ll share in the next article, where I plan to talk about the (hopefully successful!) results of our launch.

If you want to support us or watch our preparation in real time, follow our product page so you don’t miss the launch.

📅 See you tomorrow (October 4, 12:01 AM PDT) here: https://www.producthunt.com/products/ipnote

PS. If you’re interested in my checklist and other materials I collected, leave a comment under the post. I’ll be happy to share:)