How We Aced Our Product Hunt Launch (And How You Can Too)

The Story of My Product — Rapid

8 min readNov 10, 2017

We recently launched Rapid — our real-time, cloud-hosted database service on Product Hunt (PH) and we did it with a fair amount of success. I decided to share my experience launching on Product Hunt. This post will show you how to avoid getting buried under the vast amount of daily product listings on Product Hunt and help you get into the top 10 products of the day!

Making it to the top 10 makes a huge difference as it guarantees being featured on the PH homepage generating more organic interest in your product.

Note: I won’t go into detail about why it’s a good idea to launch your product on PH, this post is most beneficial to you if you’re about to or thinking of launching on PH. Read till the end!

First Things First, Here Are Some Stats About Our Launch:

7th most upvoted product of the day
400+ upvotes
Traffic: 5000+ pageviews from 1500 users in 24 hours
Came 2nd in the “developer tools” category (after Shai Wininger’s Lemonade Inc.)
Came 2nd in the “APIs category”

Here are the steps that will get you into top 10 on Product Hunt

Find an influential “Hunter”

Product Hunt has a category of users called “Hunters”. You can’t become one unless you’ve been invited into their club by another hunter. Hunters are users on Product Hunt that hunt products. You can’t just submit your own product, a hunter does that.

Here’s how to identify the best hunters. Firstly, your Hunter ideally has a number of successful products they’ve hunted in the past. Secondly, they have a large number of followers on Product Hunt. Top Hunters have at least 5000 followers on PH. This is important because their followers are notified when they hunt a new product either through a notification or email! You can check both pieces of information by looking at their profile on PH.

The best way to find influential Hunters is by going to www.500hunters.com — a list of the top 500 hunters on PH.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to them. Drop them an email, find them on LinkedIn or go ahead and Tweet at them. We were lucky to have the #1 Hunter, Kevin William David, hunt Rapid. Thank you Kevin!

Leverage Your Community

Finding a Hunter is not where the hustle ends. Quite the contrary. Now it’s time to reach out to your community to notify them about your launch. You may already have a mailing list of people that already know about you or your product. We had a tiny email list of about 200 people who have either signed up “to be notified about our launch” or that have attended an event we organized in San Francisco. But I knew I could rely on these people as they knew me personally or knew about Rapid and were therefore willing to help out.

Other sources of people that care about you are your Facebook friends, Linkedin connections or event Twitter and Instagram followers. Again, don’t be shy and reach out to as many as you can. I recommend reaching out a couple days before your planned launch and then again on the day of the launch.

Don’t boldly ask “Hey can you upvote our product?” — that’s explicitly forbidden by PH. I went for a more soothing message similar to this: “Hey we’re featured on PH today, check it out, give it some love and ask away in the comments if you’d like to know more about Rapid!”

Get the Timing Right

“Make sure to launch just after midnight Pacific Time”

Two key points to keep in mind when it comes to timing your launch. Those are 1. the actual time of the day and 2. the day of the week you launch on. The first is simple — make sure to launch just after midnight Pacific Time. That’s when Product Hunt’s clocks reset and a fresh day of hunting begins. There’s a huge advantage in being hunted early in the day — you’ll get a head start which makes it easier to rise to the top. This, without a doubt, gave us a tremendous advantage over products that have been hunted later in the day.

Secondly, decide what day you want to launch on (and make sure to consult your ideal launch date with your Hunter to be sure he’s free to hunt that day — Hunters often have a pipeline of products waiting to be hunted by them).

The day of the week can make a difference. Tuesday through Thursday are days known for higher traffic on PH but also higher competition with more products being hunted on those days. Monday and Friday are less busy, which may translate into less visits to your site but there’s also less competition from other product. You may therefore have a higher chance of making it into the top 10.

We decided to take a risk and launched on a Tuesday. A few strong startups decided to launch that day which may have “pushed us down” to the 7th position, instead of being in the top 5 (which was my ultimate goal). I don’t regret the decision however as I believe the overall traffic generated on our site would have been lower, had we launched on a Monday or a Friday.

I therefore definitely recommend launching on days with higher traffic — Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday.

Reach out to influencers

“The easiest thing to do is to reach out to people via Twitter.”

This may seem like a daunting task at first, but it’s not that complicated. The easiest thing to do is to reach out to people via Twitter. Find Twitter users in your space that have somewhat of a following (at least 3–5k followers) and either tweet at them, drop them a message via Twitter or find their email address and email them.

To find relevant influencers you can make use of 500hunters.com as many of the top hunters are happy to share new product launches with their social media followers.

Ideally, you should create the initial connection ahead of your launch and send them a reminder about your launch on the date your product gets released on PH.

Make their life easy by either providing the influencers with the copy you want them to use in the tweet they send out or simply ask them to retweet your tweet that announces the launch.

Using this approach, we had a number of Twitter influencers tweet about our launch that drove traffic to our PH listing and got us those valuable upvotes.

Snapshot of our traffic throughout the launch day

If you like what you’re reading so far, please consider giving this post some 👏

Stay on Your Feet, All Day Long

Be prepared to answer comments PH users post on your listing as well as other inbound messages you may start getting. Be quick to answer comments to encourage engagement on your listing. This is a crucial factor (apart from upvotes) that pushes your product to the top! (PH measures engagement that way)

We received messages through email, Intercom as well as our public Slack and my team was prompt to respond. We took turns throughout the 24 hour period, however be ready to stay up late and wake up early — you also need to be there to make sure your product actually works throughout the day.

Don’t ask for upvotes

I touched upon this above and this is a bit of a paradox. You need upvotes to be at the top of the charts, however you are not allowed to directly ask people to upvote you. I’ve heard of products being banned on PH for asking users for upvotes, so don’t risk it.

The Product Hunt algorithm knows that you’re asking for upvotes because it tracks how users access and engage with your PH listing. If too many users simply come to your listing, upvote and leave, that’s a red flag. The way to work around this is to point people to the Product Hunt homepage and let them find your product themselves.

Prepare in Advance

Apart from connecting with Hunters, influencers and your community, there are a number of other things you will want to prepare in advance.

Be the first one to post a comment as soon as your listing goes live. Take this opportunity to introduce yourself, your product and your story. And prepare this in advance. You’ll have plenty of other work to take care of when you go live.
Create images that demonstrate what your product is/does. These will be shown to PH users at the top of your listing and make that first impression of your product.
Create a walkthrough video. It’s not that hard. Just record your screen and show people what your product does. You can use Apple’s QuickTime player to do that.
Create an icon to use as a thumbnail image. This can be your logo but gif-style animated logos grab more attention. You can use this tool to do that.
Reach out to one of Product Hunt’s Community Managers and verify that the day you intend to launch on PH isn’t crowded with launches of other “big name” startups. Community Managers have a pipeline of planned launches.

Parting Words

Launching on Product Hunt is an eye opening experience that will teach you how to communicate with your users, allow you to onboard new users, and get invaluable feedback from the community. I encourage ya’ll to give it a shot. What’s the worst that can happen?

Finally, thank you to all of those who gave us some “love” on our launch day, to my team who was there for support and to Ryan Hoover, Andreas Klinger and Lukas Fittl for creating this fabulous platform that Product Hunt is.