How we got 1,000 new subscribers on Product Hunt in 48h
A week ago, we launched The Weekly Shuffle on Product Hunt. In 48 hours, we went from 0 to hitting a 1,000 subscribers for our email newsletter, and got to #2 on Product Hunt. This is a step-by-step account of how we did it.
Step 1: The Idea
We recently built Shuffle, a web app that makes it easy to turn long podcasts into short video highlights so you can share and discuss the best parts of your favorite shows.
We realized a low-effort way to get more interested users might be to start a newsletter featuring the best podcast highlights of the week. We decided to launch it on Product Hunt asap, and sprung into action on Friday night. Some beer helps.
Step 2: Prepare your collateral
This can be broken into three buckets of work. Have a first draft of all 3 as quickly as possible and move on to step 3 — you can always edit this later once the hunter has scheduled your post in Product Hunt.
Building a landing page: This involves building a landing page aimed at conveying your value proposition and optimized for a single call to action. Our goal in the product hunt campaign was to maximize email subscribers, so we kept our landing page simple with a giant “Subscribe” CTA.
Designing collateral: You’ll need an attractive thumbnail (size: 240x240, 2MB) since that’s the first thing that will capture attention on the leaderboard. We went with an insanely hilarious thumbnail of Elon Musk on The Joe Rogan Experience. 😂
The second thing you need is at least 2 gallery images (size: 635x380, 3MB) for the Product Hunt gallery to show off your product. Be mindful that the 1st image you select will be used as the og:image across Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook etc, so make it count!
Writing copy: You can find the official checklist from the Product Hunt team. As a maker, you also want to draft a comment you’ll post, to give the community more context on what you’re building and why.
Step 3: Find a top hunter and schedule your post
Find a top hunter on 500hunters who might resonate with what you’re building.
Chris Messina, an ex-Google and Uber product designer who is the #1 tastemaker on Product Hunt has made it super easy to reach him with his website. You can fill in a form (which includes all of the collateral from step 2) and reserve a time on his calendar to be hunted. Note that he has the right to decline requests for hunting.
We were extremely lucky to grab a last-minute slot due to a cancellation and he was generous enough to proceed with it, even on a Sunday. His slots are typically booked a couple weeks out.
Side note: One thing I learnt in starting up is that it’s hard to make people care about a new product. Anyone willing to devote time and energy to helping out other people’s startups is a saint. Chris Messina is a saint.
Step 4: Launch day
Sunday 12pm was go-time and we were excited!
Here’s some things you should do:
- Post on social media: Have a template ready to go so you and your team can announce it on your social networks. We didn’t do this, but it’s worth tagging Product Hunt on Twitter in case they decide to RT your post!
- DM your early supporters to check it out and give feedback or RT: Don’t ask for upvotes though — being perceived as gaming the platform might result in removal. As such, we were mindful to only ask users and friends who might already have a Product Hunt account to check our post out.
- Reach out to Slack / Wechat / Whatsapp groups of startup folks: This was a great way to get exposure for the PH post. If you’ve been in tech a while, you probably belong to a couple of these techie communities. Remember to be respectful and not spammy!
All posts start out hidden under the “Newest” filter, instead of the “Popular” leaderboard which is what most Product Hunt users see. Your post also won’t index in their search bar.
I started freaking out after 2 hours — despite having 40 votes and up, which was more than a couple of the products on the “Popular” leaderboard, we were still languishing in the “Newest” valley of death.
After doing some brief research, it seemed that the PH algorithm takes into account factors other than the number of upvotes. My guess is that they probably look the velocity of traction (i.e. how many upvotes/comments given the time of submission), as well as the amount of followers your voters have or the clout of their account. Thankfully, at 5pm, a job ran that flipped us over to the Popular column, and it started getting traction with the community from there. We were back in the game!
The next time, I’d optimize for an earlier posting time (say 12:01am PT) so that the entire process would be less nerve-wracking.
Step 5: Celebrate
Whatever results you achieved, take the time out to celebrate a new milestone together with your team! You deserve it.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, please share your love on Medium or give us a shout out on Twitter. If you’re interested getting a weekly email digest of the best 60-second podcast highlights on tech, startup, business, and life, subscribe to The Weekly Shuffle. I promise it’ll be good.
