In your opinion, what is the "right" way to launch on Product Hunt?
Hey everyone!
I just finished building my newest project and I'm moving on to preparing for the launch.
I have launched on ProductHunt twice before, and both times ended up at around #30 for the day.
In your opinion, what is the best, or "correct" way to launch on ProductHunt?
Please share your experiences and learnings from launching, and please share your launched products!
Have a bunch of people handy to quickly support you on the launch day. Here is our most recent PH launch experience.
In Product Hunt, you can schedule the launch and create the whole launch page with logo, images, description, first comment etc. I think they allow it 1 week in advance.
The best time to launch is 12:01 AM PST so you get more time. But I guess anytime in the first 30 minutes is fine.
Your votes/comments in the first 30 minutes keep you in the league and keep you ahead in the game. Once you stay in the top#5, you get more views and thus more votes.
If you see something is not right - if your product not coming up on the homepage in spite of a good number of upvotes, DM PH support (from the chat window). They are helpful.
Your reviews carry a certain weightage too, apart from upvotes/comments. And you can ask explicitly for reviews (grab your reviews link and ask your supporters to review too).
Have a good logo. A good logo attracts more eyes.
This was super useful and just scheduled my Product Launch off the back of the advice. Thanks!
Thanks for this advice!
No problem!!
The single most underrated move is warming up your PH profile before you launch, commenting, upvoting, and engaging for 2-3 weeks so your account has a signal that you're a real community member. PH has an internal trust system, and new or cold accounts contributing votes on launch day can get filtered or weighted down, which founders only discover after the fact.
On timing: 12:01 AM PST is right, but what you do in the 90 minutes leading up to it is just as important. You want your core supporters, even 15 or 20 people, to know exactly when midnight hits and have the link ready, not waking up to a Slack message at 8 AM wondering what happened. That first-hour spike is your entire launch.
And don't sleep on the tagline. I've worked on brand positioning for major global campaigns, and the same principle applies: 10 words that communicate the transformation for the user outperform any clever wordplay. "X for Y who want Z" is boring, but it converts, and on PH, you have about 3 seconds before someone scrolls.
I created a Coda doc with collected advice from others who have launched on Product Hunt. It also has a task checklist that you can adjust to fit your product and timeline.
Let me know if you have feedback.
https://coda.io/@colleenmbrady/launching-on-product-hunt