Lord Husband and Father of House Rhea, Keeper of Louisville, Lord Paramount of County Boulder and Warden of the West. Product Lead at Binocs.

Jul 28, 2016

How We Prepared For and Executed Our Product Hunt Announcement

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Ryan Angilly (I highly recommend the Ramen Product Success Blog) and Devon Tivona (check out Pana, it’s very cool) for offering a lot of helpful advice on how to have a successful debut on Product Hunt. Much of what you’re about to read has its origins in their willingness to sit down and talk us through their own experiences.

In late June, we announced Binocs on Product Hunt. It was a successful launch for us, as we ended the day at number three and developed an enthusiastic base of early supporters of our product.

Here is what we did to prepare for our big day. Hopefully, you’ll be able to use these suggestions to make your day on PH as exciting as ours was for us! 🎉

Prepare

1. Get a Product Hunt account.
First thing’s first. After your product gets Hunted, you’re going to register yourself as the Maker and then start replying to comments from the community and upvoting those comments like crazy. Get yourself an account and upvote a few of your favorite products and post some comments, just to be certain everything is good to go.

2. Pick a day and make it firm.
I did a lot of research running up to our announcement to try to find the best day of the week to announce. Various guides I’ve found offer contradictory advice on the day of the week you’re most likely to make a big splash, so my advice boils down to this: Choose a day that gives you enough time to prepare your assets, line up an influential hunter, and that most/all of your team will be able to set aside to focus on your launch.

Mark that day on the calendar, and make it firm. As the date gets close, you’ll get cold feet. Bet on it. “Are we sure?” “What about ____?” But, if you’ve got the majority of these suggestions in place, reduce scope and hold yourself accountable to your deadline.

3. Ask an influencer to be the “Hunter”.
You want someone with a lot of followers to post your product because their followers will get a notification which will hopefully turn in to votes for your baby. You can definitely post your own product, but unless you’ve already got a large following, you’re probably better off enlisting the help of someone who’s kind of a big deal.

Think about your network and who you’re connected to that might have a large following on PH. If you’ve combed your network and there aren’t any good leads, then consider reaching out to some Top Hunters who would be interested in what you’re building. Give yourself some lead time if this is the case because they may want to kick the tires on your product for a bit before offering up their endorsement.

4. Make it easy for them to help you.
Write their PH post for them. Tell them, “We’d be grateful if you could do us a favor and post {your company name} on Product Hunt. To save you some time, here’s an example of what you might say … ”

They may throw it away and not use a word, but you’re showing them that you value their time and giving yourself a better chance of getting to Yes.

5. Provide your Hunter with your Link and PH Info.
When your Hunter posts your product on PH, there are a few basic screens they’ll need to complete.

Your link is simple enough. It’s the link to your website.

The info PH asks for is a little more in-depth, so you should provide this to your Hunter to make things simple.

Let your Hunter know the product name, tagline, link, category, topics, and status. You can edit these fields once you’re the registered maker, but it won’t hurt to be prepared to provide these. You can find a list of all PH’s topics here, browse that list and find 5 that are best suited to your product.

Your Hunter can leave the Media and Makers sections empty, but you’ll want to be prepared to upload a logo and banner soon after posting. We’ll get to that in just a minute.

6. Prepare a welcome comment to post immediately after the influencer Hunts you.
Once you’re live, you want to have a bit of an elevator pitch ready to post. Thank your Hunter, describe your product, and thank the PH community for the chance to share it with them.

You can see an example of our welcome comment if you sort by Most Upvoted on our Binocs PH page.

7. Give a special offer to PH visitors on your landing page.
Visitors to your site from PH will arrive with

?ref=producthunt

appended to the URL. Work with your development team to display a special welcome message and/or promo code to PH visitors. The law of reciprocity suggests it will increase their likelihood to upvote you. Also, it just makes sense.

8. Follow PH and PH principals on Twitter.
You’ll increase your exposure if Product Hunt tweets about you during the day. So, be sure you’re following them and have a good handle on their key players.

9. Prepare a thumbnail, header, screenshots and a GIF of your product in action.
Your thumbnail is the image that will appear on PH’s homepage. They recommend 600 x 600 or larger, and if it’s a GIF, keep it under 3Mb.

The header is the background header image that will appear at the top of your PH page. They recommend 1200 x 400 or larger.

You’ll also be able to add more images to your product gallery, so have a handful of those ready to upload as well.

If your product is something that needs to be seen to be believed, prepare a GIF of the core functionality and have it ready to post in the comments, in your media gallery, and definitely mention it to ProductHuntGIF on Twitter.

10. Have a batch of answers ready for likely questions and comments from the PH community.
Once you start to get some traction, you’ll hopefully start getting some comments! It’d be fantastic if these comments were nothing but encouraging cheers and shouts of “Take my money!” But, that’s unlikely to happen, right?

If you’ve already released to a private beta group, then you probably already know what some likely questions or objections may be, and you can get those answers canned up and ready to go. We created a Google Doc and added to / edited it in the weeks leading up to our launch.

If you don’t have any users yet, snoop around on PH for apps and products that are similar to yours. Look through their comments sections and see if there are some tough questions for your competitors that you can anticipate and be prepared to answer.

11. Set the day aside and have your team ready to respond to questions and concerns from the PH community.
A good day on PH is certainly no guarantee of a successful company, but it is confined to a single day and until you relaunch a major release, you’re not likely to get a second chance. It’s a big deal, and you should prepare your team to give their full attention to the launch.

Have everyone block out their calendars and be prepared to answer questions, deploy hotfixes, and pester friends and family for votes.

Execute

You’ve laid the groundwork. You found your influential hunter, all of your assets are ready, and your team is gathered around the conference table with bagels and coffee.

It’s go time.

You’re shooting to end the day at #4 or higher because that gets you in the newsletter the following morning. I mean, obviously you’re shooting for #1. But #4 and up, we’ll take it.

1. Ask your Hunter to post at a specific time in the morning.
You want to be tuned in and ready to go the minute your influential big deal person hits “Submit”. So ask them to post at a specific time.

There’s a lot of conflicting data on this as well in terms of how posting time contributes to PH’s algorithm, and it’s likely to change by the time you read this. So, again, make it a time that works for your Hunter, you, and your team. If you can’t decide, then let’s just say 7:00 a.m. Pacific. Ok, there you go.

2. Add yourself as a maker.

Once your product shows up, click the + button underneath the “Makers” label, enter your Twitter user name, and pretty soon, one of PH’s official Twitter accounts will reach out to you to verify that you’re a Maker.

Then your comments on your product page will have a green “M” label.

3. Post your prepared Welcome Comment.
You should already have this written and ready to go (Step 6 above).

4. Be a visible Maker, respond to and upvote every comment.
PH’s ranking algorithm is a mystery and nobody outside the company knows exactly how it works. The end-of-day rankings are not simply based on who got the most votes in 24 hours.

One thing that certainly seems to factor in to the ranking is how many comments and replies your product is generating. You should reply to everyone who is talking to you because that’s just good product management in the first place, but hey, bonus points in this case that it’ll also contribute to your ranking.

I can’t say for sure that upvoting the comments contributes to the ranking, but it probably doesn’t hurt. Upvote the comment of anyone who joins the discussion.

5. Link to producthunt.com/[tech|games|books|podcasts] when asking your community for support.
When you reach out to your community for support on the big day, don’t send them directly to your PH page. Send them to the PH category page (i.e. http://producthunt.com/tech) that you are listed under and ask them to find and upvote you from there. Those upvotes will appear as organic traffic and are most likely more heavily weighted in the ranking than votes from visitors that land on your page, upvote, and then immediately leave.

6. Settle in.
If you start getting traction and find yourself in the race, you may find yourself refreshing the browser every 30 seconds. We certainly were.

It’s going to be a long and exciting day. Try not to drive yourself or your team crazy.

Good Luck!

Well, that’s what worked for us. Please let us know if you have any additional ideas or recommendations to share!

And if you’ve got a launch day on your calendar and you’d like to jump on a call, shoot me an email (brian@getbinocs.com) and I’d be happy to find some time to chat.

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