27 tips to nailing your Product Hunt launch in 3 minutes!

Andrew Michael
Marketing And Growth Hacking
4 min readFeb 2, 2016

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This guide is intended for the unprepared, who have just been hunted and need fast advice. This worked for us at adsvise.com helping us get over 500 upvotes and finishing 4th on the day behind Adobe & Facebook, but is by no means the perfect formulae.

  1. Make sure you are prepared before being hunted (if not it’s also ok, just skip to point 2).
  2. Breathe…
  3. Stop shouting, your team mates are next to you. Their hearing hasn’t suddenly deteriorated since the PH launch :)
  4. If you have not been added as a maker on your product, tweet to Product Hunt to get added asap.
  5. Update your PH listing with your artwork to make it more appealing. A gif is a great way to stand out!
  6. Introduce yourself and the product to the community in the chat.
  7. Invite your team members as makers to join the conversation. Make sure to respond to all comments from the community.
  8. Breathe…
  9. Check your servers to make sure they are handling the traffic and keep an eye on it.
  10. Share through all your social channels, personal profiles & company pages.
  11. Get on twitter and spread the word to influencers and people that would find your product useful!
  12. Don’t spam! you will get called out :)
  13. Find relevant facebook groups and share.
  14. Find relevant google communities and share.
  15. Reach out to message boards and communities that are relevant to your product, Growth Hackers & Inbound.org worked well for us.
  16. Try not to share the direct link where possible, it works best if people discover your product on their own with the PH algorithm.
  17. Create an easy to follow template of how people can “discover” you and upvote if they find your product interesting, to help you when sharing ;) (You are not theoretically supposed to ask for an upvote).
  18. Probably the most important point of all is to create a cool product, if it is useful, the community will upvote. We just passed the 500 upvotes mark with Adsvise and still going strong.
  19. Post to slack teams, they are great! Slacklist.info has a great list of teams to get you started.
  20. Post to Reddit! r/startup, r/entrepreneur & r/business are good but find the most relevant to your product and post there and ask for honest feedback.
  21. Send out a mail to your contacts & mailing lists.
  22. Don’t sleep! Product Hunt’s day starts and ends at 00:00 PST, make the most of it!
  23. Don’t stress you can still rank higher than a product with more upvotes if you are hunted later in the day and have less upvotes as PH’s algorithm takes into account the time of day you were hunted.
  24. Prepare a special offer for the Product Hunt community if relevant, and add it to the page they are landing on.
  25. Prepare a short press release and reach out to press who have covered you before or you know well to try get a little extra coverage. There will not be enough time to reach out to others to help with the PH launch.
  26. Don’t sleep! Trust us it’s worth it. The money is in the list :) If you make product hunts mailing list you are rocking and in for double the traffic.
  27. Last but not least do not forget to say thanks! Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré Thanks for hunting us :)

SKIP THE CRAP BELOW IF YOU HAVE JUST BEEN HUNTED NOW AND GET STARTED WITH THE POINTS ABOVE.

We found a plethora of really good articles on what to do on Product Hunt but nothing straight to the point with actions to implement immediately when in a rush.

We would like to update this post moving forward to make it super useful for those in a rush to get what they need and make the most of the time they have.

If you have any quick tips that worked for you and your team please let me know in the comments and I will update the post for future product makers with a reference to you and your product.

Happy hunting to the hunters & building to the makers!

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