🎉 Results & Lessons learned from my First Product Hunt Launch

This past Wednesday, ChromeExtensionKit was launched on Product Hunt! I figured I would write up a bit of the results and what I learned in case it helps anyone else in a similar scenario.

Context

I've launched a couple products in the past on various sites (HN, Betalist, etc), but this was my first product to actually launch on Product Hunt. The product was hunted by Chris Messina and the entire process was pretty straightforward from start to finish; I got all the assets and required content prepared and just waited for the launch. In order to make sure everything went smoothly, I ended up staying up until the launch which was around 3AM my time which made for a fun time the following day 😅.

Results

The product stayed on the homepage the entire day, however it never cracked the top 5 and only briefly cracked the top 10. Here are the results:

🏅12th Place
↕️ ~300 upvotes
👤 ~700 pageviews
💵 20 sales

Lessons Learned

1. Somewhat of an obvious one, but rank definitely matters. Sitting outside the top 10 (and still on the front page) brings in traffic, but I imagine that is exponentially higher the higher you get on the page.

2. Having someone hunt your product is hugely helpful, especially when you aren't quite as aware of how everything works on Product Hunt.

3. The type of product has an impact on popularity. If you look at the top products on any given day, they all typically have some way to test if paid, are open source, or are completely free.

4. Related to the previous point, since my product is purely a paid digital product, not having a way to test it out made it a little harder for Product Hunt users to convert in some instances, despite a lower price point. I had a couple reach out to ask if there were examples of the code, which got me thinking how I can tackle this hurdle in the future on the landing page.

5. Offering some sort of discount to Product Hunters seems to help conversion quite a bit. I have offered coupons here and on some other channels, but it completely slipped my mind for Product Hunt. Looking back I think that may have positively impacted it to some degree.

Overall I'm quite happy with the launch and I learned a lot! I hope that helps and if anyone has any questions I'd love to answer them.