How we debuted on Product Hunt and didn’t screw up
I’ve already mentioned how RAWG debuted on Product Hunt. Since the early February we’ve earned 700 upvotes. And no, we didn’t even make it to top-5 products of the day, but this was still some great experience. I learned a thing or two, and I’d like to share them.
Mind that if you need yet another ultimate guide to get featured on Product Hunt — this isn’t one. Besides, Product Hunt has one of their own.
The two ways to get upvotes
Basically, there are just two reliable ways to make people upvote your product. There’s a chance that your product goes viral, but if you don’t practice ancient dark magic, you can’t control that. So the two ways are:
- Spend countless hours on Product Hunt, using it like your average social network. Comment, review, reply, gain followers, rinse, and repeat. Then, when you finally launch your product, you followers will be notified and they will likely check your submission. (One of the top search results about getting featured on PH even leads to this Quora answer suggesting that you should ask someone else, some PH-influencer to submit your product. Which I find pretty overserious.)
- The second is that you use your average social networks to share your submission and hope that your followers outside Product Hunt will drop by and upvote.
If you’ve googled ‘How to get featured on Product Hunt’ and are reading this, chances are you have close to zero followers on PH and you launch your product in a week. Relax then, this is exactly the place where we were in January when we decided to try Product Hunt.
Wrap your product
First and foremost, your product should be targeted at product-hunters. Apparently hunters are mostly other people who might launch a product too, they are founders, marketers, programmers, lots of designers. There are also a few tech journalists searching for topics. Taking this into account, you may guess what products they want. There are some fluctuations, but in general the products I see on the front page are about:
- productivity. To-do lists, reminders, email-plugins, etc.
- work organization. Project management, calendar and tasks, and all-of-these-in-one.
- prototyping. Convert Sheets into websites, Sketch into apps, etc.
- design (for dummies, usually). Colors generators, logos generators, colors for logos generators, etc.
All these links above are top-3 products of the day for a few recent weeks, but I guarantee that not much changes round the year.
Fortnite is overwhelmingly popular. It hit 3.4 million concurrent players in February with somewhere around 50 million players overall. But when the iOS version of it launched on Product Hunt in the middle of March, it didn’t even reach 1,000 upvotes. It simply doesn’t belong to Product Hunt, and being #1 product of the day didn’t help it much to top the download charts in over 40 countries within a week.
Another thing that helps to win the hearts of hunters is focus. The simpler your product description is, the better. Even if you don’t ‘do one thing well,’ tell one thing well and show one thing well.
RAWG is a complex product. It syncs your profiles on Steam, Xbox, and PSN, and lets you track games across all platforms. It lets you rate and review games. You can also make collections — lists of games united with one topic. There’s also a small social side — you can find and follow your friends and watch their gaming experience in the activity feed. We couldn’t strip it down to do just one thing well, but we could show just one thing well.
Before we debuted on Product Hunt we’d redesigned our front page and game pages and collected over 15,000 profiles of game creators in addition to over 50,000 games. Because we see personalizing gaming industry as one of our main goals.
The newest and simplest to present part was the database with the focus on game creators. We chose it because, first, the value of databases are easily understood by tech-guys, who are the majority of product-hunters; and second, they understand the problem that software creators have little to no exposure, while users of their products may be huge in number. This is the problem game creators have too.
We came up with the short message — ‘the IMDb of video games’ — because it described everything we wanted to in few words. A ribbon for our wrapped product.
Turn your company into a social media army
Now, back to the two ways to get people to upvote your product. Since we were clueless product-hunters with no followers there, we tried to get our friends on Facebook to upvote it. Let me quote Product Hunt’s FAQ:
Feel free to share a link on social media. You can share a direct link to the product, but we ask that you don’t ask for upvotes.
That’s what I did. I shared a direct link to product on my Facebook, wrote an announcement centered around the game creators database and its importance to the gaming industry. I made my colleagues share it. We even got some of our early investors to share it. We didn’t ask for upvotes, we just announced our redesign and the new part of our database through the Product Hunt post.
After a couple of weeks I scrolled through hundreds of our upvoters and watched every single profile. Yes, I am stubborn. About a hundred were either our followers, or followers of our friends. Their upvotes gave us an initial boost that landed us on the top of the front page the next day.
Then we slid a few positions down.
It was okay, since RAWG couldn’t obviously compete with other products featured that day, such as analytics for prototyping, a background colors generator, and, most importantly, a remote whiteboard. Product Hunt is their turf, and we are just a bunch of kids from the entertainment & media neighborhood.
Noteworthily, RAWG gained much more upvotes than the fifth product of the day but still finished the sixth. Of course, there’s an answer for it on the FAQ, implying smart algorithms based on Big Data, Machine Learning, AI, and some woo-woo practices, but the way I see it is this. Basically, Product Hunt treats upvotes differently based on channels they come from and time distribution. Roughly speaking, a splash of 100 upvotes from Facebook is less valuable than a long steady wave of upvotes from the Product Hunt community. Which is a right approach, if you ask me.
Then you might ask: ‘Why do people care only about getting featured on Product Hunt and not being #1 product of the day?’. And I’ll tell you: ‘Because it doesn’t matter if you are the first, the third, or the eighth.’ It really doesn’t! This is not Google or e-commerce where ‘the winner takes all’ rule applies. When you are searching for inspiration, ideas, and maybe some partners on Product Hunt, you are likely more thoughtful than when you need to find or buy something quickly. So you probably won’t be satisfied with top-3 results, you’ll want more. What I am trying to say is that if you are featured (roughly) within the first ten products of the day, the amount of feedback, exposure, and traffic you receive is (roughly) the same.
Is getting featured worth it?
Now, this is all about it. What do you get exactly if you are featured? Just how many unique visitors or pageviews? How much media coverage? How many investors will file into your office? How many gazillions will you make? Well, let’s not get overexcited here.
You can google others’ figures, and I’ll share ours. Overall we earned more than 3,000 visitors on rawg.io/?ref=producthunt — this is where product-hunters go if they click the ‘Website’ link inside the post. Unique visitors in real-time from Product Hunt peaked somewhere around 150 and stayed over 100 for few hours. I’d be happy to speculate how many followers on Twitter or Facebook we made, but (un)fortunately GamesIndustry.biz published an article about us the next day and shared it multiple times, and things got complicated. Anyways, this doesn’t seem like a huge number, something like a few dozens of followers.
The media coverage is not guaranteed. But sometimes it happens. We got this article on GenBeta, which is a Spanish media about technology with 680,000 followers on Twitter. (This was an awkward way to say that it is quite popular.) It flooded RAWG with Spanish-speaking users, and we couldn’t be happier about it. To this day we have Spanish in our top-3 users’ languages on RAWG. Guay!
I contacted Gabriela Gonzalez, the author of that article. She agreed to answer a couple of my questions.
How did you decide to write about RAWG in the first place?
We write a lot about communities, also I’m a gamer. If I see something on Product Hunt that gets my attention I try it out first and if it’s good, I write about it. If it’s new and no other media in our language has written about it, even better.
How often do you take Product Hunt submissions as topics for articles?
I use Product Hunt as a source all the time, at least once a week I find something there that I like and that I feel my readers will like. I have alerts for a lot of topics, and of course 90% of the things I see never get published.
Is there something that can increase chances for a product to get published?
For us in our site it usually depends on how useful the product is, how new, if it is available in multiple platforms, if it is free or has some free tier, and if it simply catches your eye in some way. I also select things just based on my personal taste. I pay a lot of attention to design, if a site or app is ugly I close the tab immediately.
Hurray, she’s called RAWG beautiful!
The third good thing was the feedback. It actually might be the best thing you get from there. Because you get feedback from other designers, programmers, and others from the IT-crowd, and this kind of feedback is much more detailed, useful, and honest than you can possibly get anywhere else. I also wrote a bit about the feedback we got here.
So. Is getting featured worth it? Absolutely yes, if you are in the beginning of the way to success. You’ll get some first fans and core users, maybe someone will even launch a fan subreddit (thank you, Seb!). You may get some media exposure and lots of precious feedback. If you are up-and-coming — do that for the feedback. If you are a Fortnite-level product with millions of users, — although I doubt you’ll ever read this post, but if you do, — then you don’t really need Product Hunt. You are all good already.
As for RAWG, I think we still have a long way to go, and we will definitely be on Product Hunt next month with a new crazy feature. If you want to know what this new crazy feature will be, hit the Follow button below and don’t forget to clap.
