Marketing advice from Product Hunt's Head of Growth

The devil works hard, but Jason Levin works harder. The Head of Growth at Product Hunt, he’s ghostwritten for some of the biggest names in tech, scouted for Creator Ventures, scaled a SaaS company to 135,000 users, written a book on meme marketing, and built a newsletter about organic growth to over 20,000 subscribers. 

I was fortunate to catch up with him and get some of his top advice for aspiring makers:

1. What are the keys to a successful Product Hunt launch?

Having distribution definitely helps.

It’s kind of the secret trick to Product Hunt, and you see that when you look at the top makers. The Marc Lou’s, Pieter Levels’s, and Tibo’s of the world all have over 50,000 followers, so they have people who are ready to support all of their new launches. 

This is something a lot of people complain about, but their energy would be much better spent building their own audience. Every big account you see started as a small account that grinded their way up. So, my number one advice would be to build your audience.

The best way to do that is by building in public. Share your stories, your trials and tribulations, your MRR screenshots, your Figma designs, your customer feedback, and everything else that comes with building a startup. The more you can share, the better.

2. When should founders launch on Product Hunt?

I think you should launch once your product is helpful to a few people besides yourself. Usually, this means that your product solves one problem better than anybody else. That’s really hard to do, but if you’re able to do it right, then you’ll probably find that that’s all you need. Just look at Marc Lou and Shipfast.

So, once you know that you’re solving one problem really well, then you should launch on Product Hunt.

3. What makes for a really good tagline and images?

For the tagline, clear is better than clever. 

You have to remember that Product Hunt isn’t just people in your circle; it’s people all over the world. They might not speak English or get your jokes. So, the more clever you try to be in your tagline, the more people you risk confusing. Check out our CEO Rajiv’s tips here on taglines (he’s launched 7x!!!). 

My advice on the images is similar: keep it simple. I see a lot of people paying fancy animation companies, or maybe even just crappy ones on Fiverr, when they really don’t have to. Just show your product, how it works, and how it improves people’s lives. 

Same thing with the demo video. All you need is a Loom walking people through how to use the product. 

4. Should founders focus more on their personal brand or company brand?

Always start with the personal brand. 

It’s so much easier to build your founder account. People want to hear from people on social media. They don't want to hear from some logo until that logo is huge (ex. OpenAI). So, focus on building your founder account and just put your company in your bio. You can start working on your company page once you have around 10k followers. 

Founder-led marketing just works. I’ve been working at jam.dev for the last 18 months, and in that time we’ve scaled from 15,000 to 135,000 users, and it’s mostly been marketing on the founder’s account. Levels has built a career off founder-led marketing. Paul Graham built YC off founder-led marketing. People think OpenAI came out of nowhere but even Altman had been building his audience on Twitter for over a decade. 

So yeah, the future of most startup marketing is founder-led. 

5. What social media platform should founders focus on?

Twitter is the best place to start. It’s the highest density of smart, wealthy people in tech. Of course, your target market does matter. If you’re trying to sell to teenage girls, then you should probably be on TikTok. But if you’re building for developers or founders or marketers, then Twitter and LinkedIn are where you should be, as it’s very easy to repurpose content between the two.

Ultimately, though, you should focus on the platform you enjoy the most and can picture yourself creating content for decades. Social media marketing is a grind. If you don’t enjoy putting in the work, then you’re never going to make it. I’ve been tweeting since I was 13. That’s half my life of tweeting my crazy thoughts, and I have no plans on stopping.

6. Is it worth hiring a social media manager or a ghostwriter?

I’ve been ghostwriting for founders for the last three years, and I’ve found the best results come from those who have already developed their voice, their network of friendships and connections, and found product-market fit. These founders will often have 3,000 or 4,000 followers and now just don’t have the time to continue. At that point, it would make sense for a ghostwriter to come in and scale the thinking they’ve already developed.

And then, even when you have a ghostwriter, you should still be regularly tweeting on your own. Do your own reply guying, post pictures from events you go to, and share product updates. Tweet on the toilet if you have to. It doesn’t matter; just fire off some ideas. 

7. How do you stand out on social media?

Memes. I wrote an entire book on meme marketing, but the TLDR is that memes break through the noise. They’re a great way to stand out with humor. Everyone tries to sound smart, but if you’re funny, you sound smart naturally, and you get to make people laugh. 

I really can’t emphasize enough how powerful this is for a small account. Nobody takes you seriously yet anyway, so you may as well embrace it and have fun. And if you’re really good at memeing, like Turner Novak or Eric Zhu, then there is absolutely no limit on how far memes can take you.

8. Final piece of advice?

Just launch more stuff, and as you’re doing it, tell the internet all about what you’re doing. It’ll take a while, but eventually, you’ll build a cult following that’ll be there to support all of your projects.