The Complete Guide to Launching on Product Hunt

You only have one chance of launching on Product Hunt. Don’t you want to get it right?
YOLO! You Only Launch Once!
So what is Product Hunt and why should you care?
Why are the innovators so important?
But I don’t even have commenting rights on Product Hunt – how can I then do a successful Product Hunt launch?
So let me teach you how.

Product Hunt is a place where journalists, investors, and members of the tech community spend time discovering and discussing new products. Comprised of a community of innovators and early adopters, the platform can help reach a large audience all at once: famously one product received 43,000 unique views by being voted to number one. The front page of PH gets the most exposure, and these top products are promoted in their email digest. But in order to reap these benefits, it’s vital to understand how PH works, and be creative about how to make the most of your launch.

What is Product Hunt?

For the uninitiated, Product Hunt is an online community, app curation, and discovery platform where users share app news and recommendations with each other.

It’s essentially like a Quora or Reddit for apps, where apps are curated and either get upvoted or downvoted by the community. The platform also allows commenting, so each thread comes with relevant discussions about each app.

How Product Hunt Works

Members who post app recommendations are called product Hunters, so to post an app is to “hunt” it.

App developers are called Makers, and they can also hunt their own products.

Aside from typical audience engagement and upvotes, Product Hunt has its own algorithm which determines how an app gets ranked and whether it gets featured on the homepage.

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Product Marketing Tactics We Used to Generate Buzz

In a moment, we will share a detailed step-by-step guide to our product marketing strategy.

But for the impatient, here is a snapshot of the product marketing tactics we used to generate buzz for the app.

Social Media Banners

As Dave mentioned in his Reddit post, social media buzz was key to our product marketing campaign’s success.

Before we launched, our design team already crafted customized banners reflecting our new brand. Each one was tailored for Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Additionally, we had special “milestone” images designed for celebrating if and when we hit 100, 300, and 500 upvotes.

In-App and In-Site Messages For Long-Time Customers

As an app that’s been around for over three years, we’ve accumulated our own loyal bunch of customers and site visitors who were more than happy to support us.

To help mobilize these long-time users, our Head Copywriter Daphnie edited the templates announcing our launch along with a section to fill in with the link to our listing.

We used Daphnie’s final copy on our pop-up message for returning site visitors as well as in-app notifications for customers logging in.

Eventually, we updated these notifications to cover each new milestone that we hit.

Newsletter Announcement

Daphnie also published our Product Hunt announcement through our weekly newsletter, where we have over 10k subscribers.

Team Member Support

To widen the reach of our product marketing campaign, everyone in the team went through their own networks to share the news.

Here’s Dave’s post on his Facebook.

Now that we’ve shared our main product marketing tactics, let’s move on to a more detailed breakdown of how we executed our strategy.

Our How-To Product Marketing Steps For Reaching #1 on Product Hunt

Dave and Evgen organized a list of tasks into a spreadsheet and made this accessible to all the team members involved in the product marketing campaign.

They divided the sheet into three tabs for each chronological period related to the campaign:

• Pre-Launch
• Launch Day
• Post Launch

Each column contained instructions on what to do, where to store any files involved with the task, who is responsible for it, and a section to indicate the task’s status.

Pre-Launch Product Marketing Task Checklist

1. Find a Hunter Who Will “Hunt” the Product

There is an ongoing theory that Product Hunt’s algorithm puts less value on apps promoted by their own Makers.

Product Hunt has since pointed out that this is false and that in fact, Makers can hunt their own products.

However, we found out that certain Hunters have special privileges where a product they post makes it straight to the front page instead of the less-trafficked “new and upcoming” section.

So, we erred on the side of caution and decided to find another Hunter for our relaunch.

It’s a good thing that in all our marketing campaigns, we managed to develop warm relationships with some of our prospects.

Because of this, our Asset Manager Evgen only needed to send out a couple of emails until we got a “yes” from at least one of them.

Once Evgen found our Hunter, (special thanks to our friend Chris!) he provided the necessary info our Hunter needed to post about our product.

That included our:

• Product name
• Product tagline
• Link to the product
• Handles of the makers
• Blurb for the maker
• All product screenshots, GIFs, and other necessary images
• Youtube link to our product explainer video

After setting our launch date and time, Evgen packed all these into a Google Docs folder (you can also use Dropbox) and sent it to our Hunter.

2. Brainstorm Ideas for a Special Launch Day Promotional Offer

To encourage more people to try out our product, Evgen and the product marketing team brainstormed ideas on the best special promotional offer for the launch day.

It was a delicate balance between giving a significant discount and not selling our product too short.

In the end, the team decided to offer 10% off the first month for new registrations.

(Tip: We don’t advise this for newer products with no prior fan base, though. In that case, it’s a better idea to offer something ridiculously low at first. That way, you can get the most out of your launch.)

To make sure that every Product Hunt user will see that offer, we added a banner on the top of our product pages specifically for any visitor traffic that arrived via Product Hunt.

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