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Today is my first launch on Product Hunt - What a stressful day!

Hello IndieHackers,

I'm super proud to announce the launch of Misakey 1.0 on Product Hunt!
To celebrate this, I wanted to share my journey by preparing for a Product Hunt Launch. I learned so much with IndieHackers these past months, so I want to give back and share that I'm available if anyone is in need.

We just launched a few hours ago, so I'm not telling you "hey, I'll explain to you THE way to be "product of the day" on Product Hunt!". I'd just like to share my humble experience with you guys. 🙂

I, Fabien, Product Manager organized with my Growth Marketer colleague, Arnaud, the launch on Product Hunt. We started well in advance as we planned this launch since two months.

We had developers working hard on the product, and it is really, really cool! So we decided it was time to show our product, get our first testers, and our first users.

So there we were… We made up our minds! We're going to get started on Product Hunt!

But when?

Our research has shown that big products launch at the beginning of the month and that the best days to be “Product of the day” are mid-week.

Okay! We will therefore launch on September 22:

It's Tuesday!

It's at the end of the month!

Top! We have our date!

Fun fact; You have surely noticed that today is Wednesday and not Tuesday. We were ready yesterday, but Product Hunt didn't want to let us publish our product (the publish button simply didn't work haha).

Now, what to do?

We really took it to heart to be ready for the launch. We followed a bunch of guides.

The main ones are these two:

https://www.notion.so/lazyapp/Product-Hunt-Launch-Checklist-82da26cc0ac04f06a9af6553de1b34bb

https://blog.producthunt.com/how-to-launch-on-product-hunt-7c1843e06399

(If you are on IndieHackers, thank you, guys! These were really helpful!)

With the guides, we established our Product Hunt launch roadmap!

We had so many things to prepare... We didn't have any content strategy yet.

We had to think about how to describe our product, create our landing page, make a video. In addition, we didn't have any visibility or any community to speak.

We also wanted to start discussing with communities of makers!

This is why I started posting on IndieHackers and Product Hunt (and what great communities!)

I had many interesting discussions!

By dint of discussing these channels (+ LinkedIn, Slack and Telegram), we finally hit a huge milestone 5 days ago… Our first 100 users! What a pleasure!

To sum up, this experience was very enriching. I learned that we have to be prepared to launch on Product Hunt :

  • You need content (video, pitch, landing, mockup etc.)
  • If you already have a community or users, it's a real advantage
  • Being "product of the day" offers visibility, but starting the discussion before the launch offers just as much.
  • Discuss with people is really important - Besides If there is one thing that I would like to change, it is to spend less time focusing on the launch deadline and more on interactions with the communities which was very interesting

And you, do you have any experiences to share on your Product Hunt launches? Have you prepared your launch beforehand?

I would be glad to hear your experiences about your launches!

  1. 4

    I looked at him all day long, he even put few 5-sec auto-refresh screen everywhere in the office 🤣
    But indeed, it is stressful!

    1. 1

      5-sec auto-refresh

      I thought I was the only one who felt like that 🤣.
      Consider launching on Hacker News too, it did well for our product more than PH.

      1. 2

        Ahah no you weren't ;)

        Thank you Hamzoun! (Very nice idea and I love your UI)
        Oh, then we might have a try at it!
        Do you have any recommendation like time of the day, type of post, etc?

        1. 1

          Check this:
          https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-we-got-to-the-front-page-of-hn-and-stayed-17-hours-with-no-help-5ec8c6c485

          If you get about 10 upvotes from different people within the first hour, you'll end up in the front page for a while.

          NOTE: don't try to spam it or invite your friends to upvote your product, they have a smart algorithm to detect that.

          Good luck.

          1. 1

            That's a good one, thank you Hamzoun!!

  2. 1

    Congrats! Good Luck with launch

  3. 1

    Congrats on launching on ProductHunt! It looks like its going well so far.
    What were your strategies to create buzz on other platforms like telegram and slack?

    1. 1

      Thanks @KeysKbr! Yes, we announce our launch on some slack and telegram communities!

  4. 1

    all the best guys

  5. 1

    Nice job, I see you have 100+ upvotes. Btw what software did you use to make the video?

    1. 1

      Thanks! I tried many tools for finally use Premiere Pro and after effects :)

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