EPIC launch on ProductHunt

My name is Artur Kiulian, I’m the founder of Capitan — smart shopping list app that learns as you use it. And we’ve decided to make a little show out of our app launch :)

This is a live timeline of our ProductHunt launch that is happening right now and you can also join video hangout to see what I’m doing in real-time.

No filler here, I won’t be going through basic things that all other guides are covering but instead will share things people rarely do.

And you can also suggest any tips and tricks meanwhile.

2:00 PST

5 upvotes

As recommended numerous times by “how to launch on producthunt” articles we’ve reached out to one of the influencers to post us. Huge thanks to Nichole for helping us out with this part!

[Deeplinking hack]
Since we are the list app, we’ve decided to go for the special list of cool things called Product Hunter Pack that is added for everyone who downloads our app from the PH referral. This trick was pulled off by the use of the contextual deep links offered by the awesome BranchMetrics.

[Content marketing hack]
The other hack we’ve decided to set up is actually writing this article that will describe in depth, hour by hour our launch experience. The ability to indirectly promote your product through content marketing is one of the underutilized tactics each founder should use whenever possible.

[Power users hack]
The cool thing Nichole recommended was to actually bring in some of our early beta testers to PH and leave some feedback on our app, I believe this will give our posting more credibility and will actually improve the rankings indirectly since we all know comments influence your ranking. Waiting for them to wake up now haha.

3:00 PST

25 upvotes

We’ve managed to get local entrepreneurs’ support which is getting us some good feedback and conversation within the thread ^_^

4:00 PST

38 upvotes

We are #1 on PH, holy cow. Feels great and means we’ve done our homework well, waiting for some time before announcing our launch to other channels :)

5:10 PST

54 upvotes

Seems like getting to the top brought in the organic flow of traffic and for the past hour we’ve barely posted anywhere, though I’ve finally posted it on my personal networks. Also by now it’s clear how posting by the influencer gives us a boost over other companies even if we are balancing on the same amount of upvotes. Comments also definitely help with this.

6:00 PST

82 upvotes

Our beta testers waking up, adding some credibility and kind words to the posting :)

6:45 PST

105 upvotes

[Facebook likers hack]
There are few things on facebook that can potentially help us out, and ALL of them are things that don’t scale. The very first one is to get use of the facebook search graph and reach out to cohorts of product hunt likers and tell them you’ve launched:

First one is an obvious “people who like product hunt”:
https://www.facebook.com/search/1424823437804167/likers/

Second one is trickier since you rely on facebook graph algorithm to identify people in your inner/outer circles that you most likely can message:

“Friends of my friends who like producthunt”
https://www.facebook.com/search/str/friends%2Bof%2Bmy%2Bfriends%2Bwho%2Blike%2Bproducthunt/keywords_users

8:00 PST

154 upvotes

We all know that feeling…

Suddenly Instagram revealed new feature but we are still #1, time to make use of slack communities.

[Slack communities hack]
There are numerous communities related to your or general niches listed here, the cool thing about smaller ones that you can get some support for your launch there.
Also since I’m one of the organizers of the local PH meetup in Kyiv, Ukraine.
I have access to a small but very effective slack community of entrepreneurs.

10:00 PST

245 upvotes

We are not the first ones anymore and I don’t think we can potentially top the posting by Ryan Hoover about the Instagram stuff :)

So 8 hours after the posting and I finally feel pretty confident finally making the use of this article in the form of content marketing.

First let’s post it out to the major marketing communities such as inbound.org and growthhackers.com and see how it goes.

Then lets try the startup/entrepreneur groups on facebook, linkedin and of course reddit subs, not putting much hope for those but it should definitely bring in some traffic.

To be continued…

Have a tip for us? Reply below or tweet at me ;)