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35 Comments

@producthunt hunters?

I was wondering if anyone has any advice on the best way to find a reasonably high profile hunter for a launch? I've reached out to a couple directly (one of which I've met before) but I haven't had any responses.

  1. 4

    I know a great hunter who can help you out... shoot me a note. She has several product of day awards from this year alone. She doesn't charge, but will only hunt if the product is great.

    1. 1

      Thank you Ryan! That's so nice of you. As I mentioned to @jjejje below, my timezone messed me up. I should have come to IH to check for responses rather than just posting. Here's the post anyway: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/angstrom-life

      Thanks!

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        All good! I checked it out! Looks great!

        1. 1

          Thanks Ryan :) Glad you like it!

  2. 3

    I could help! Could you email me or reach out to me on Twitter @JuliaEnthoven ?

    (I was nominated as PH maker of the year in 2018, but we definitely had our products hunted by influencers in 2017. I think it's super important to getting featured, despite PH's official advice.)

    1. 1

      Oh no. I messed up. When I went to bed last night there were not no comments on this thread. When I got up this morning (I'm in Ireland) I just started to execute my "non-hunter" strategy. If I had seen your post I would have held-off for another day :(

      Anyway, I can't unring that bell. I put it live. It will probably get lost in the ether but here it is:
      https://www.producthunt.com/posts/angstrom-life

      I should have known the amazing IH community would have come up with something.

      1. 2

        SUPER fan of the onboarding!!!

        1. 1

          Ahh thanks Ryan! :) It was a custom job. I wanted to do something different to get the concepts across without the standard click around the interface tours, which I always skip!

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            This reminded me a lot of my own onboarding that I have in my app (found an old WIP recording here).

            Fun fact: got totally polarized opinions on my onboarding. Some adored it, while others hated it. Hence will simplify it greatly, e.g. ditch the chat-like flow and replace it with an RPG-like flow (i.e. line by line, with user explicitly advancing the dialog). The biggest concerns of those who hated it: TL'DR, chat is too fast for them, or too slow for them.

  3. 3

    I don't think you need a high profile hunter and PH agrees: "You don’t need to reach out to “top hunters” or influencers to get your product hunted. Ultimately the community upvotes products they like and find useful...".

    When I launched, I hunted Landen myself and only had an email list of ~30 people to tell about it. At the end of the day it made #3 with about 800 or so upvotes. A couple years before Chris Messina hunted another product I worked on which ultimately got ~150 or so upvotes.

    Instead make sure your landing page communicates your product clearly, maybe ask your fellow IHs for feedback?

    1. 1

      Hi Felixg. 800 votes without a hunter?? You must have an amazing product. What is it? I ended up posting today without a hunter. I don't expect to get to #3 as you did but hopefully get some eyeballs. To be honest, it's just a relief to have pressed the "Launch now" button. No more thinking about it.

      1. 2

        Just wanted to say that you don't need a hunter, but I see you're on PH already.

        The only benefit of having an influential hunter is that they could also tweet about you and bring in more traffic on the launch day. But that's it.

        I hunted my product myself, got to #3 and ~500 upvotes on a Wednesday (Tue and Wed are the most competitive days). But I did an overall coordinated launch with a review coming in a leading Android media, with some reaching-out on Reddit (I completely overlooked Hacker News though, could've finished #1 with them, lol), with ~60 Upcoming subscribers etc. I hunted myself on Tue but got scheduled for the front page on Wed; by Wed I already had some head start and was #1.

        1. 1

          Thanks Paul! I would say that it is going OK. In terms of upvotes anyway. Sales are going better than that :)

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            Hey! Just got a newsletter from BetaPage and realized you haven't put a "WE ARE ON PRODUCT HUNT TODAY" badge anywhere on the site. It's a must! You're missing out on potential upvotes because of the lack of it.

            1. 1

              Awww man, you're so right. Complete f-up on my part :(

              1. 2

                I think you should remove the "support us" wording — could be seen as asking for upvotes and get you in trouble. Consider replacing with something more neutral, e.g. "Just launched on Product Hunt!"

                1. 1

                  Paul. You've felt like my co-founder today. You're an awesome man!

                  1. 2

                    haha, just happy to help 🙂

                    Quite possible that I'll be using the product myself because the pain and the angst of solo hacking is damn real. The only thing stopping me is that I already have my tasks in Trello and dread the thought itself of having to transfer it all into Angstrom.

          2. 1

            Glad to hear! 👍 I remember your product, although I never got around to trying it tbh :( Good luck getting into top 5!

  4. 2

    We hunted ourselves (just become hunter yourself) and it's easy to ship.
    However, we made a mistake of asking our current users to check our launch, and their upvotes actually dropped us to the bottom (from #3 place)... so your success is fully dependent on current Product Hunt communities upvotes, and thus it's good to get enough of them to check and upvote.

    1. 1

      That must have been hugely disappointing. Getting into the top three seems to be a serious badge of honour these days.

      1. 2

        That did suck then (we were 3rd during the beginning of the day). But eventually, we get honored with 5th most upvotes for the day (but as you can imagine, there weren't really upvotes after they dropped us to last) ;)

        Well, it's a learning for us, and the launch continues, every developer should try this for their own or organizations repos: https://github.com/apps/softagram (so we can get more feedback to serve you better... and also enough users to get to the marketplace ;) )

        1. 1

          Wow that's a slick looking product. I'm not surprised you managed to get back to number 5. Well done! My launch isn't going so well. It's about to fall below the fold in 10th place. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/angstrom-life

          1. 2

            Use all the channels as a solo founder have to:

            LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook
            Blog posts and add the same in Medium/LinkedIn (then share in LinkedIn, Twitter etc)
            Reddit message, e.g. /r/startups:
            HackerNews message (https://news.ycombinator.com/show)
            Answers to Quora

            And then ask your friends to comment/upvote the posts.. I wish good luck, it's going to be a great day for you!

            1. 1

              Thanks for everything Tommi... Really appreciate it!

    2. 1

      However, we made a mistake of asking our current users to check our launch, and their upvotes actually dropped us to the bottom (from #3 place).
      How does that work? Shouldn't I ask my current user to upvote in PH if I'm planning a launch soon?

      1. 2

        It is risky alright from what I have read. They are really trying to prevent gaming of the system, which is understandable.

        I launched it without a hunter in the end. If you'd like to have a look: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/angstrom-life

        1. 2

          Really good stuff!! (indeed, now if any other Indie hackers are also PH users, check this out and help Kevin with upvote!)

          1. 1

            Thanks Tommi! That's so nice of you :)

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          Congrats on the launch. It looks really cool! Would definitely share it with my project manager friends.

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            Thanks Donal! Please do share. The more feedback I can get the better...

      2. 2

        If they are in PH already, then sure every vote and comment counts. If they are not (and just upvotes and sign in first time at the spot), the outsider's upvotes actually screw the algorithm so that position gets worse than without.

        If they do it with direct upvotes for the post, then PH supposed just to ignore them. With direct link I mean like: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/softagram , not by going to PH site first and then "finding you")

        1. 1

          The "direct vs finding" is a debunked myth. PH themselves told that's not true, and quite the opposite — upvoting from the front page can be detected as gaming the algorithm.

          1. 1

            Correct!! That's why I propose that if you ask current users to like your product, better to have then to go through a direct link instead of via "finding" to avoid the downside

        2. 1

          I see, thanks for the info!

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