🎉 Launching on ProductHunt today! What we've learned at Hardcover

This is my first time launching on ProductHunt and let me tell you: there’s a learning curve. There are plenty of terminologies to learn (hunters vs makers), different things each person can do, a whole community of paid services, and a lot of good and bad mixed in.

Today we launched Hardcover, the social network for serious readers. We’re aiming to be the Letterboxd for books (if you’re a film buff, you may get the reference). Here's the tl;dr of what we do:

Hardcover is a social network for people to track what they read and want to read, make lasting connections with other readers and find life-changing books.

You can check out (and please upvote!) our page on ProducthHunt here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hardcover

There are a ton of articles about how to launch on ProductHunt. Rather than reiterate everything, I’ll just share a few things that stood out to me and that I wasn’t expecting.

• The “hunter” is the person who posts your product. Ideally, you want to find a hunter who is in your niche and you can work with.
• They’ll need to fill out a lot of info about your site, so it’s best to work closely with them. Invite them Discord/Slack to chat through it.
• Create as many images as you can (at least 7-9) to show off your product. Don’t show off every interface. Focus on teasing your product, but giving people enough to be interested. A good image will show people what they can do and why it’s important.
• All posts are live for a 24-hour period. You should set your post to go live at 12:01 am PST to make the most of your launch. When you’re submitting your product and set a future date that’ll be the default time.
  You can embed ProductHunt with the current counter on your site if you’re getting traffic and want to direct some of it over to PH. (ex: https://hardcover.app/)
• Engage with the comments. That'll help for sure.

As for what to expect from this? That I don’t know. My hope is for this to bring in a bunch of new users obviously. More than that though, if the launch is successful we’ll get more feedback on if what we’re doing today is resonating with readers or if we need to change something up.

I’ll do a follow-up later on in the day with how it went, what went well and what we could have done differently.