How I got my messenger bot in Product Hunt top 5, and what did I learn from it?
On 28 Jun, I released my Bot “Kukie” on Product Hunt. 1600 People interacted with my Bot, around 30000 messages were exchanged on a single day. This is the story of what I did that got us into the top 5 and what I learned from it.
About my Bot — Kukie
“Kukie” is a messenger bot which can recommend over 300+ resources across 40 categories to build and grow your startup. It was built as a side project by Aditya Ahluwalia and me. We wanted to learn about building bots and also share the resources we loved with the community.
After our Product Hunt launch, Kukie was featured by Venture Gali, Bot Arena, Botlist, theinsightsout, arturogoga (Spanish) and this is just the first page of google Search. Oh yes, Kukie is now Search Optimized thanks to Product Hunt.
What is Product Hunt?
Product Hunt is a platform to showcase the best new products, every day. It is a place for product-loving enthusiasts (like me) to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware products and tech creations.
100s of products release every day and simply the best ones finish on top.
Why all the fuss about being in the Product Hunt top 5 ?
Simply put "It is the best launch ever" as you get -
New Users as the top 5 get maximum visibility
Amazing and useful feedback
Free PR by top publications
The next day your product goes in the Product hunt mailer to all its users
How to make it big on Product Hunt?
To get to the top 5 of product hunt is not easy as the final rankings depends on
- The quality of users up voting your product
- Rate of getting up votes
But if you have built a useful product and follow the steps that I did, you will have a really good chance of landing in the top 5.
Step 1 : Start early
Start preparing 2 Weeks before the launch. Make a Product Hunt Profile if you haven’t already. You’ll observe that you don’t have commenting access or Posting Rights. Well, that’s the wonder of Product Hunt. You’ll have to ask the Community manager, Ben Tossell for an invite. Send him a tweet - Ben Tossell.
After you’ve gotten commenting rights, get noticed on Product Hunt. Test other products on Product Hunt and give them feedback of value. Product Hunt is a community of tech pioneer and adding value to the community is always nice.
Step 2 : Choose your Hunters
Bear with me, If you post your Product yourself, your product will show on the Upcoming Feed. That’s of no use because on Product Hunt only trending products of the day get traction. How to solve this? Have an influential Hunter post your Product on Product Hunt.
Hunter’s are the top 1% of Product Hunt. They are the elite group who post the best products on Product Hunt.
You can find the best Hunters on http://yvoschaap.com
Start a conversation with them on how it would be nice if they could post your Product. For Kukie, I asked Jack Smith.
Step 3 : The Early Release
So the best day to release is either a Tuesday or a Wednesday. The best products release on these day and products released on these days get the max upvotes.
The best time your Hunter should post the product should be when your T.G is online so that you get your initial up votes quickly. I posted it at 00:00 PST which is 12.30 P.M India when the maximum people we knew (who would support us) be online. We lead the day for 8 hours and this helped us finish the day in top 5.
Step 4 : A great intro post
When you post your Product tag yourself as the Maker of the product. Now, give a brief summary that explains your Product and all relevant Links. This is the Kukie Product Hunt Page. Anyone who wishes to know more about Kukie will see this. Being descriptive here really helps.
Step 5: Engage and encourage conversations
Answer all questions and reply to all comments that people have. Be polite, be concise and be witty.
Step 6: Go social, engage and re engage
Now you go social, share it with your community and ask for their feedback on Product Hunt. Also remember that asking for upvotes is Taboo. If you drive traffic with the objective of feedback, that’s more beneficial. So for Kukie, We made a Medium Post on how Kukie was made
We continuously updated our friends on our position. We took screenshots like this and kept distributing them:
We also made a video that was beneficial — A fun video depicting the workings of kukie.
We also promoted kukie by educating people on how I made Kukie and how they could make their own Bot -
We also reached out to the people who helped us. Telling people that their tools helped us is a way of saying thanks.
After following all the best practices and a 24 Hour fun filled marathon. Kukie finished in the Top 5 products of the day. Kukie got featured on the Product Hunt Newsletter and that resulted in over 2000 users exchanging 50K+ messages with Kukie in the next 7 days.
Our Analysis
Kukie is a Bot and Bots learn fast. We made Kukie Product Hunt ready in 4 Weeks and this is what went well for us —
- Ensuring Kukie can answer maximum questions
2. Ensuring that we accounted for basic keywords and handholding like — help, menu, settings, home, what do you have etc.
3. Ensuring that the users get the most out of Kukie :)
At the end of the day we feel that if you -
“Keep your product Easy to understand, Intuitive, Instant gratification based, Good looking and useful. It’s bound to work.”
I would love to know what do you think about my experience and what have been your learnings while building a product.
