How we got 1,000 up-votes on Product Hunt
by Nathan Bernard, CEO, Lrn
Introduction
My name is Nathan Bernard and I want to share Lrn’s (my startup) story of launching on Product Hunt and the strategy we used to get over 1,000 up-votes on launch day.
Before we get started, I want to say thank you to Bram Kanstein of Product Hunt. We intensively studied his Medium Post on launching to PH and it was amazingly helpful. Thanks so much Bram and the PH team.
Our Product & Company
Let’s start with a background on our product and company. Lrn is a mobile app that teaches you to code through interactive mini-quizzes. We like to think of Lrn as a “Duolingo for programming languages” with the goal of getting every person on earth “fluent in the language of programming.”
We are a team of 3 (Nathan, Chirag and Logan) based in NYC and we are currently building & bootstrapping Lrn together. This means we all contribute to: Design, Development, Writing Content and Growth & are living off savings and the revenues we make from the app.
The early stage of our business led us to a launch strategy that involved no budget. We are not guaranteeing that following our launch process will get you traction, but it did work well for us. Let’s dive in below!
Pre-Launch Preparations
Having a successful launch starts months before the actual launch day. There were several efforts we focused on pre-launch, starting about 3 months out. Here is how we thought about pre-launch and the initiatives we executed on in chronological order:
1.Build a product you believe in: This seems obvious, but without a product that fills a real need it will be very hard to find a market. I had just taught myself to program and was frustrated that there was no great mobile solution. This led us to believe that for others learning to code, they may also like a mobile approach.
2. Friends of the Company: We were lucky enough to have a network of supporters I carried over from my previous startups. Once we had a beta version we tested intensively with this group of 40. Testing not only made our product 100x better, but got this network invested in the product and our mission.
3. Mailing List: From our combined networks we put together a mailing list of 20,750. We pulled the contact emails from places like Gmail & Linkedin. It’s very easy to export these contacts and import them into Mailchimp.
4. Press Intros: We gave ourselves a week to get supporting press for our Product Hunt launch lined up. We had a friend of the company, Alex Taub, make introductions and we were able to work with Business Insider & The Next Web to put out articles. Below is the pitch I used to get the press meetings:
5. Press Cold Call: Cold press pitches can also work. See the template I used below to reach out to cold contacts. This pitch has started some amazing conversations with press outlets for us:
6. Medium Blog Post: We wrote a medium post to coincide with our launch. Medium posts goes a long way in explaining why you are building your company and product.
With all of this in place we were ready for our launch day!
Launch Day
We had laid out a very set schedule for launch that we followed throughout the day. Having a schedule kept us on task and I’d definitely recommend using one! Here is the schedule we followed and the stories associated with each time slot:
5AM-6AM: Post to Product Hunt & Release Blog Post
Yes, 5AM. To get maximum exposure on Product Hunt you want to reach the European audience. One of our advisors, Eric Friedman, was awesome and woke up with us at 4:30AM to post early. At this same time I also published our origin story to Medium.
6–7AM: The Next Web Article Released
We worked with Mic Wright of The Next Web in Ireland to put out a piece on Lrn for launch. This helped tremendously with European traffic and moved us quickly up the ranks on Product Hunt.
7–8AM: Customer Support
We started engaging the users commenting on Product Hunt. This helped us build up comments, which we assume, is a driver for getting ranked highly on the Product Hunt homepage.
8–9AM: Personal emails to “Friends of the Company”
Next we sent personalized emails to the “Friends of the company” network. This network helped to spread the word tremendously.
9AM-9:30AM: Business Insider Article Posted
Then the Business Insider article came out via Maya Kosoff. This was timed to coincide with the USA audience coming online. It gave us a nice bump in Product Hunt up-votes and more importantly started some lively discussions on our thread.
9:30AM-10AM: Send MailChimp mail
The next step was sending out the MailChimp mail to the list of 20,750 we mentioned prior. Here is the MailChimp template we used:
10AM-12PM: Customer Support
After the articles and email went out we were firmly in 1st place on Product Hunt and stayed there for the rest of the day! We dedicated serious time to answering every comment on Product Hunt and all in-bounds we received.
Talking to your users is so important. These are your early adopters and champions. You want them invested, because if your users are happy, no matter how many of them there are, they will share their experience and thus you will grow.
12PM-12:30PM: Lunch
We broke bread for a bit to take our minds off all the craziness.
12:30PM-1:30PM: WeWork Article Posted
We have a small office at a WeWork in NYC, which is a great co-working space network. They put out an article and sent it around the entire WeWork network. Below is a picture of Chirag and I in “Lrn HQ.” If you look close enough you can see that I am writing this post during the picture. So meta.
1:30PM-Infinity: Customer Support
The rest of the day and night was solely dedicated to customer support. We talked to each and every user that got in touch with us whether it was on Product Hunt, Twitter, Facebook, Angellist, E-mail or someone stopping by and saying “hi” in person at WeWork.
This diligent responsiveness we kept was a huge part of why we were able to get to #1 on Product Hunt and get all the up-votes and comments.
Stats & Conclusion
After a crazy day of Product Hunt we were able to get a lot of follow-on effects from the launch. Here are some of the stats and outcomes from our launch:
- Featured in 6 countries iOS app store home pages as “Best New App”
- Reached #1 in Education in 3 countries
- Picked up organically for stories in Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Nu.nl (largest Netherlands press outlet), Yahoo News and numerous blogs
- Received tens of thousands of downloads
- Made thousands in revenue (we can eat this week, yay!)
- Contacted by numerous investors, angels & VCs
- Joined the 1,000 up-vote club on Product Hunt, huzzah!
It is impossible to be successful without a community supporting you. Thank you so much to the amazing Product Hunt Community & our personal networks that helped us launch a product and company we deeply care about. Now, time to get back to work :)
