3 Portfolio Companies At Starta Accelerator Share Their Experience With Product Hunt: SendPulse, Webjets, RevealBot

You should have heard of Product Hunt as a great marketing tool for your new product launch. You can onboard first users, receive valuable product feedback and even grow sales!

Like in Reddit and Hacker News, there are a few tricks that lead to a successful launch and help startup owners and their products get noticed. We talked to founders from SendPulse, Webjets, and RevealBot, they participated in various batches at Starta Accelerator in New York, to learn about their experiences and how Product Hunt impacted their businesses.

What kind of products or services do you recommend launching on Product Hunt?

SendPulse: Product Hunt is primarily used by early adopters and innovators who are very receptive of new products and services. That is why pretty much anything that involves AI and machine learning will receive good engagement and feedback. For example, our AI solution for emails got 1255 upvotes — that’s quite a lot. Besides, marketing solutions land well too while big enterprise products and services are better fit for mass market than the ProductHunt community.

Webjets: To add to that, I would say that any tech, software or geeky hardware startups have a chance to become quite successful on ProductHunt. Sometimes even books do well.

RevealBot: I agree. Product Hunt — is a community of tech enthusiasts who know a lot about the industry. It would then make sense to launch products that will be trendy and interesting for them. From chatbots, AI and ML to a really great product that has not been introduced to the tech world yet — everything has a chance to get the audience attention if it offers value to potential customers. However, I don’t think that healthcare, education or manufacture would fit well with the overall ProductHunt culture.

What were the positive outcomes from the product launch on PH?

SendPulse: For us, the impact was very tangible. Besides receiving really good PR in both US and Germany, our sales have grown too. The product launch has visibly improved our performance and company’s brand awareness given a rather complex niche that SendPulse operates in. Finally, feedback we received from our target audience during the launch helped us a lot with our product development roadmap.

Webjets: After the launch, Webjets received a lot of new sign-ups and even pre-orders. We also got amazing PR after launching when smaller websites and blogs found out about our product and featured us in their articles and reviews. In a way, the launch has created a small viral effect.

RevealBot: When we launched for the first time on PH, we just wanted to breathe life into our product and attract a few users. Because of the launch, more than 400 companies registered on our website and we were able to quickly collect meaningful feedback and understand where to go next.

…more than 400 companies registered on our website and we were able to quickly collect meaningful feedback and understand where to go next.

What was your product launch timing?

SendPulse: For a well-made quality launch, one will need 2–3 weeks of preparation. During that time, a company will have to ‘check-off’ the following: content creation, website landings, special offer development and meetings with a hunter. The company also shouldn’t forget about engaging their existing audience, so they would be the first ones to support the product with upvotes. This step is very crucial as early upvotes will establish and keep the product’s visibility during the day — don’t overlook that. Can’t help mentioning, that the Starta community helped a lot too. With over 80 projects in Starta’s portfolio, we felt tremendous support from every member during our launch.

Webjets: The overall preparation is definitely important, but so is the exact timing. Webjets launched at 3AM ET. This is when the Product Hunt day starts. There are many resources online that can explain this process in a greater detail, but as long as you have around 200 upvotes by 9 AM, you are good to go.

Any tips for other companies (things to do, things not to do)?

SendPulse: First, don’t create dozens of new accounts to launch your campaigns. It is considered cheating and is often tracked so you could be delisted or banned. Second, actively work with your audience during the entire day, engage in the comments section and encourage people to keep talking about your product. It will increase your chances to get to the Top 5 and then get additional traffic from a weekly digest email that Product Hunt sends out to its users.

Webjets: From our experience, it is important to create a checklist to launch successfully. Here are some examples of tasks and activities that we kept in mind while preparing for the launch:

1. Have your entire team export their LinkedIn contacts and divide them into 3 groups: friends, acquaintances, distant
2. On the day off, write personalized emails to your LinkedIn and other networks. Do not link directly to your product or those votes will not count. Instead, link to PH website and guide them to your product
3. Create a landing page with a special offer or specifically dedicated to Product Hunt
4. Coordinate with your accelerator to get upvotes from them as early as possible. Make sure they use cellular instead of WiFi since too many upvotes from the same IP get penalized
5. Never ask for upvotes on social media

6. Make sure that the pic for your product is interactive or something fun like a gif

RevealBot: These all are really good tips! Finally, it is very important to understand why you are launching and why the audience should be interested in your product. If you are offering something new and really awesome, the audience will notice and respond. Otherwise, if your offering doesn’t provide a new solution or a unique value, the aforementioned tactics and tips would probably never work.

Companies Overview

SendPulse, Batch #2, Evegeny Medvednikov, co-founder

SendPulse platform offers multiple channels of communication with customers such as email, web push notifications, texts, and Viber. The company also uses AI and predictive analysis to provide its clients with detailed statistics and analytics to maximize marketing efficiency. SendPulse goal is to create a simple but high-quality communication experience between their clients and clients’ customers that is beyond just another ‘email service’.

Webjets, Batch #5, Pavel Savich, CEO and co-founder

Webjets is a cloud application for collecting, organizing and sharing information of all kinds with ease. Any content collected from the web automatically turns into an interactive card that a user can organize into moodboards, mindmaps, shared projects and documents. Webjets combines digital creative freedom with powerful toolkits that facilitate content structuring and project-specific workflows.

RevealBot, Batch #2, Mikhail Trofimov, CEO and co-founder

RevealBot is an automation tool for Facebook Ads that aims to help business owners optimize their Facebook ad management routine. From automation and auto boosting to ads bulk creation, the service is an AI-powered bot capable of analyzing historical data and providing insights on how to improve performance.