What I learned with our Product Hunt #7 rank

As others have mentioned before:

Product Hunt is a game.

We launched on Product Hunt 2 days ago, on a Saturday.

Our work building up for this launch: daily interaction for 2 weeks.

We, a team of 4 people, did the following:

• Engaged in the community on Product Hunt
• Reached out and responded to people on Linkedin who found us through Product Hunt
• Email current 500 users (not effective)

That's it. We did barely anything, and are happy with the results. We received a huge traffic and 30% converted to the main app (more on this later)

There are important things to consider before launching.

1. You don't just launch, you have to prepare for it. Weeks, even months ahead.

Engaging, supporting others, and having a big supporting audience before launch are huge factors in getting you to the top 10 in the first 4 hours. After that, the more you are on top, the easier it is to get upvotes.

We were actually at #6 for most of the day, but a #9 product which definitely seemed to have bought upvotes surpassed us in an hour.

2. After that, they went back to #7 (thanks, Product Hunt algorithm). What got us back to #6 (after sadly going back to #7 in the last 2 hours) was comments.

Reply. Every. Comment. It has a great weight for ranking.

3. Why did we launch on a weekend?

We just wanted to test the waters. We are not yet ready to launch our main app, but we designed a FREE AI tool specifically for Product Hunt, and other people who could discover it in our niche.
This tool was best suited for a weekend, so we didn't have to compete with the next Notion-like app on a weekday.

4. Product Hunt's guides are very useful, give them a read. They are a single useful resource for launching.

5. Engage in the community. When you do that daily, you'll see familiar faces as well. Your followers get emails from PH when you launch.

All of this has given us a huge understanding of how to play this game, and are confident in getting a top #5 when we do launch.

PS: Are you looking for a job while indie hacking? How do you track your jobs? Eztrackr saves all jobs you apply to in 2 clicks without changing tabs and displays them in a beautiful Kanban board with statistics. Try it out now and let me know how you like it! https://eztrackr.app