The Ultimate Guide To Launching & Relaunching on Product Hunt
PART 1: LAUNCHING ON PRODUCT HUNT
As a founder, there are moments in your journey that are truly euphoric. One is when you come up with an insanely awesome idea. It consumes you and provides you with limitless energy to turn your vision of how the world should be, into reality. Another is launch day when you get to experience first hand whether the world you believe with all of your heart and soul needs to exist…is in fact, desired by others.
“The last 10% it takes to launch something takes as much energy as the first 90%.” — Rob Kalin, co-founder of Etsy
The decision of where and how to share your vision of the world is a big one. Momentum builds momentum. From our experience Product Hunt was the best way to share our startup elink.io — an all-in-one content curation platform that turns web links into visual content in minutes. Each collection of links can be converted into curated newsletters, single web pages or embedded onto a website or blog.
Here is what we experienced by having our product hunted:
- Massive surge in traffic & sign ups
- 300+ Tweets & mentions within 48 hours
- Amassed a ton of power users
- Obtained incredibly insightful peer feedback
- Picked up by a dozen publications from around the world
- Peaked the interest of investors
To many founders, trending in the top five of Product Hunt is a badge of honor. elink.io ended the day on Product Hunt as the fourth most popular product, right behind Apple’s Music API, Microsoft’s version of IFTTT and CareKit by Apple. There is no way for you to predict who your competition will be the day you launch. The only two things that are within your control are your product and preparation.
Product Hunt is a place that can strike fear in the toughest of techie’s hearts. It’s the startup equivalent of a ‘scientific journal’ where you showcase your product to your peers. In Product Hunt’s case, your peers include some of the most capable builders, designers, marketers, CEOs, investors, journalists, members of academia and more. Members of the community provide their unique perspective and insight on various parts of your business from the product, competition, industry, design, marketing, etc. It’s an invaluable experience to go through and an incredible way to gain honest feedback and grow your user base.
Numerous founders have contacted us with questions of how we prepared for a successful launch on Product Hunt. Instead of helping one founder at a time we thought it would be great to share one mega list to help anyone who is considering launching on Product Hunt. Hopefully, these tips will provide you with the keys to Ryan Hoover’s Product Hunt Kingdom.
Preparation is ‘Key’
- Sign up for PH (Obvious). Either create an account or have a friend who has invitation privileges invite you. If you have been invited, you will have the ability to add comments to any product. In both scenarios, you can upvote cool products, create collections and follow others. If you’re eyeing a Product Hunt launch, you should join as soon as possible and become familiar with the framework and community. Take note of how makers respond to questions, how products trend, etc. Get all of your team members to join.
- Read PH’s FAQ’s. It’s the best way to understand ‘hunters,’ ‘makers’ and the whole system of how exactly PH works. A lot of founders have made mistakes upon launching that could have easily been avoided, simply by reading through these FAQ’s.
- Follow PH on social media. Follow @Producthunt on Twitter to get an idea of how they tend to promote products submitted to their site.
- Study top PH products. Go to PH and search by ‘*’ to view the most upvoted products listed. Observe how the best products were described, how the makers handled responses, what their visuals looked like, who hunted them, etc. Find products which are in a similar space as yours and identify what they did to differentiate themselves.
- Find an awesome hunter. Use Yvo Schaap’s database to identify top hunters. Choose a handful of hunters you think would be a good fit based on their ranking, follower count and the types of products they hunt. Make sure to follow your ideal hunters on PH, Twitter and work your network to find a way to get in front of them. It’s important to note that when a product gets hunted an email goes out to all of the hunter’s followers. The number of followers, hunters have can make a huge difference in getting more eyes on your product.
- Schedule a time. You essentially have 24 hours to race to the top of the board. The consensus is that you should have your submission go live between 12am-3am PST if you want to generate the most amount of traffic to your site. Work with your hunter to finalize on a recommended time that works. Make sure you are well rested before you start your journey. Our team powered through and stayed up for 36 hours straight.
- Figure out your PH link. Your URL should look something like this if it’s a tech product: http://www.producthunt.com/tech/xyz. Replace the XYZ with the name of your product. It’ll serve as a fairly good placeholder as you prep your various messages, social posts, etc.
- Create an email for your beta users. Prepare an email to send to your beta users, letting them know that you’ve product has been hunted. Your beta users are already invested in your product and have a direct experience that they can speak about on Product Hunt. Use that to your advantage and invite them to join you in the conversation. Depending on your market, your users may or may not have access to comment, but at the end of the day, they can at least provide you with an upvote. Per Product Hunt rules, you never want to ask directly for an upvote, instead use the phrase ‘come join the conversation.’
- Personal email. Put together an email for your personal network that you can fire off on the day of your launch. An easy way to grow your personal email list is to export the emails of your Linkedin user base. Often times social media posts can get lost or hidden, but a direct email can ignite some pretty interesting collaborations, ideas, introductions, and support.
- Create a GIF Thumbnail. Product Hunt allows Gifs to be placed on the main page of your product submission, and they even have a twitter account dedicated to cool product GIF’s @ProductHuntGIF. Create a quick GIF and make your product stand out in the line-up. @ProductHuntGIF
14. Product Hunt Tagline. Make sure to choose a tagline that is short, interesting and describes your product. Most Product Hunters are going to make a decision to check out your product by your tagline.
13. Product Hunt Maker Introduction Comment. Take time to write out your introduction comment now, so you aren’t scrambling the moment you’ve been submitted to put the verbiage together. Trust me you’re going to have nerves and butterflies running through you because as much as you prepare there’s no knowing what the response will be. Make sure you explain why you created your product and how your product solves that problem.
14. Create your social media posts. Create all of your social media posts and catchy verbiage ahead of time and get them all Buffered up and ready to fire off. When you’re designing or creating your various elements, you can refer to Product Hunt’s branding page to get pixel perfect assets. If you have time, make a unique Twitter header customized for PH. A lot of people will be coming to check out your Twitter page because of the various tweets, retweets, and mentions. Those extra touches go a long way in peaking the interest of could be customers by aligning your brand with such a well-known and respected tech community.
15. Give the community a deal. The Product Hunt community tends to offer a ton of great advice and perspective. One way to thank them in advance is to offer a discount or freebie if you have a paid product. Figure out what makes sense and have a code generated along with an expiration date.
16. Download IntroBar. Introbar is an easy plugin that will make your life a breeze. It allows anyone coming from Product Hunt to see a unique welcome message that you can write up and remind them of your discount code along with expiration date. It’s a great personal touch to add for these first users coming in. The best part is the whole process takes 10 minutes, to set up and write out your message.
17. Refresh Your Knowledge Base. If you don’t already have a support center, create one. Ensure that your knowledge base is up to date. You will get a flood of users from around the world. Make it easy for them to get their questions answered.
18. Set up Intercom. One of the smartest decision we made was to integrate with Intercom. It was key for us to communicate with our users from our landing page and inside our tool. We spent the most amount of time fielding questions, talking to users, gathering feedback with intercom. I highly recommend that you integrate with Intercom. They have a two-week free trial so if you’re a budget-strapped startup, time it right to take full advantage of their integration. If you can hold on to it after, it’s a fantastic tool to continue having a high level of touch with your clients.
18. Create a press page. Take a bit of time to place your logos and press assets in one location so that anyone who decides to write about your product has easy access to your screenshots, etc. As a result of Product Hunt, we ended up getting picked up by the press who didn’t contact us and either directly took imagery from our press page or created their assets when they wrote about us. It’s better to be prepared in the coming days and weeks because the momentum of Product Hunt fires off in a lot of different ways.
19. Make a video. If you have time and resources, you should seriously consider creating a video. It helps to get your messaging across. It’s amazing how many people on the Product Hunt community are from around the world. Videos can show off your product in ways words don’t. From beginning to end it took me two days to learn After Effects and create our video. It’s amazing how many resources are available online if you’re on a startup budget.
20. Join startup & industry Slack groups. Don’t wait until the day of launch to join, because membership and the time it takes for acceptance can vary. Plus it’s great to be a valuable contributing member before launch day. Go here for an awesome list of Slack groups to join.
20. Join Startup & Industry Facebook Groups. Make sure you’re well aware of their rules and regulations of what you’re allowed to post. On the day of your launch make sure to offer something and not just ask them to join the conversation. For example share that you’re giving a discount code for Product Hunters.
21. Join Startup & Industry Linkedin Groups. Again make sure you know the rules and regulations of the groups you’re joining. Do it ahead of time; it takes at times over a week to get access. Linkedin also only allows you to join a certain number of groups at any given time.
22. Utilize the Redditor on Your Team. If anyone on your team is an active Redditor, put them in charge of Reddit. There are various startup related Reddit’s that allow posts about launches.
23. Submit Your Startup to Hacker News. Add your startup to Hacker News in the ‘Show’ section. Make sure to start your submission verbiage with ‘Show HN.’
24. Download the Product Hunt App. Up until 48 hours after your launch, expect a lot of traffic and potential questions on your Product Hunt page. You want to make sure you’re able to answer questions and comment back as soon as possible to engage your customers while they are still able to keep up with the conversation. Be ready to react quickly. Comments and engagement can help you move up the ranks of Product Hunt.
25. Divide and conquer. Give everyone on your team individual tasks. We used Trello to handle preparation and execution. On the day of your launch there is a lot that needs to be kept up with from communication in all directions, server checks and ad hoc marketing/press needs.
Launch Day
After all of that prep work, you’re ready to share your product with the world. Make sure to do the following once you’re live:
- Double check your Product Hunt link. Make sure your PH link on all of your scheduled emails and social media posts are accurate.
- Group huddle. Answer any last minute questions from team members, ensure systems are a go and run full speed ahead.
- Auto share comments on Twitter. Product Hunt has a great feature allowing you to screenshot capture comments made on Product Hunt and share it on Twitter. It auto-tags the commenter and Product Hunt. It’s a great way to get more eyes on your launch.
- Thank your supporters. Take time to thank Product Hunt and everyone who upvoted your product via Twitter. It goes a long way, and many of your supporters will tweet out your product to their followers or come back to provide you with additional comments. It’s also an excellent way to identify and reach out writers/bloggers who may have liked your product. On a personal note: A big thank you to our hunter Kevin William David and all of our amazing users and supporters for an amazing Product Hunt launch.
- Leverage PR. If you’re able to rank in the top five products, you’ll be able to leverage this with the press. Take a screenshot of your performance the day of and you can even include it when you’re reaching out to particular writers. It’s amazing how many outlets around the world will end up writing about your with you reaching out.
PART II: RELAUNCHING ON PRODUCT HUNT
Our initial Product Hunt launch was the catalyst we needed to acquire a ton of power users. We spent three months listening to our customers, gathering their feedback, diving into our metrics, creating enhancements and have evolved our product into elink 2.o. With the help of our loyal customers, we have shifted elink.io to cover a wider range of attributes to help save them valuable time, money and resources.
The number one rule you need to follow if you’re planning to relaunch on Product Hunt is you should only do it if you have significant changes to your product offering.
Once you roll out a robust 2.0 release, follow the same steps above to have an awesome PH launch!
If you are curious about our relaunch, check it out here.
Conclusion
Remember the only two things you can control are product and preparation. Hopefully, these tools will help you unlock the Product Hunt Kingdom. Keep in mind that nothing in life is guaranteed. If for some reason you don’t get the outcome you wanted, know that the feedback, advice, and network you’ll gain from your launch will help put you on a path towards success.
This is one of my favorite founder quotes:
“If you launch and no one noticed — you can just launch again.” — Brian Chesky co-founder of Airbnb
Last but not least, if you have any golden nuggets of PH advice you think I should add please comment below. I’ll be happy to add your helpful tips to this list and mention you.
As a fellow maker, I appreciate your daily dedication, mental stamina, sacrifice and focus on making the world better. Wishing you a wonderful launch.
Let’s connect on Product Hunt & Linkedin.
