What I wish we knew on Product Hunt Launch Day

The Product Hunt Launch Day Experience.

About a week ago we got some fantastic news. We were going to the “Hunted” on Product Hunt. Our Hunter reached out to us (which was nice, more on that later) and gave us some time to get organized. We spent the next week with all hands on deck preparing new marketing assets that would appeal directly to the Product Hunt community. It was go time.

On top of building all new marketing assets, we also got to work on the list of outstanding bug fixes and product improvements. We wanted to make sure that we were Launching the best product we could in the time we had left. The countdown was on, and with a small team it meant we needed to act fast.

So how exactly do you launch on Product Hunt?

The problem was no one in our team had experience launching on Product Hunt before, we had little idea about what we were doing. However, Misbah graciously shared a number of growth hacks and we started reading and sharing every piece of info we could find. The do’s and don’t of a successful Product Hunt Launch. There was so much to read, all of them could be distilled down to the following.

It is your personal network that will provide the greatest results. Be prepared to call in some favors.

So you need to leverage your network but for the best results you need to mobilise early in order to gather enough moment to be on the front page when the majority of the community members come online.

There is a natural flow of community engagement that comes with any day on Product Hunt. With the majority of those votes benefiting the early starters.

One week of sleepless nights, for one sleepless night

The week leading up to the hunt was intense. Marketing material was made and thrown out, with abandon. Many iterations some with only the slightest of changes made their way into our shared drives and across our slack chats. We have a team without ego and we aren’t afraid to say when something is not good enough. This is important. It is to easy to be overly sensitive to something you made. If it is crap it has to go and the more time arguing about what is good and bad the less time there is to get ready.

The calm before the storm

We were told by our hunter that he would post our project at 1am PST. I should mention at this point that part of the team operates out of an Australian office while the others work out of Waylo Headquarters in Berkeley, CA. So it is only 6pm in the Australian office (Midnight PST) and we all get together on slack. We have worked really hard over the last week to get ready for this moment, we agree that we are ready…1am PST comes and goes…1:30am PST…what is going on? Where is our Hunter why are we not live?

Royally Screwed

A message comes in from the Hunter, there is a problem. We already exist on Product Hunt and he can’t get us on….WHAT?!? How does this happen? We had all run searches on Product Hunt before and never found our site. Sure enough 4 months ago we were hunted by a Product Hunter when we were nothing but a crappy landing page. Of course, he had no idea who we were and had had no idea how to contact us (turns out this happens from time to time). That post has a solid 4 upvotes, no makers, and no comments. So we are screwed. All that time and effort for nothing. Product Hunt does have a procedure for these types of problems but it is now 1:45am PST who is going to help us at this time of night.

A few tense moments go by and some frantic messages are sent. A chaotic 15 mins later and we have a solution. The hunter has figured out a way to get us up, but we aren’t showing up in the feature list or search? Another few minutes laters and we are LIVE!

We are Live

Get to your battle stations we are in for a long night. So this is not the easiest way to start our launch campaign….but we are Live! However, Murphy’s law struck us badly. Everything that could go wrong, did. For almost two hours, none of us could comment on the post making it difficult for us to introduce the product. Misbah, again helped us out. Sent messages to his network to make sure we could comment and introduce our product.

We thought we were well prepared coming into our launch. We had scheduled promoted tweets ready to go on the launch event and a Twitter ad campaign that was set to target the followers of @ProductHunt @HackerNews, urging them to check out the new product launched on Product Hunt. (Be careful about how you word these tweets and make sure it is in compliance with Product Hunt terms and conditions). When we were in Launch Limbo we were forced to kill this campaign to avoid tweets going out and raising awareness of a non-event. Once we were back on board it took far too long to get another set of promoted tweets up, that were attached to the original audience. What a painful experience.

As this was happening it became abundantly clear that we were going to miss the “awake” window on the Australian network if we didn’t act fast. Unfortunately what resulted was a rushed confusing Facebook post that I am not proud of. It lasted 15mins before I re-read it and edited to something more appropriate, a few more versions were edited after that before I stopped looking at it. Little did I know at the time this Facebook post to my personal network was going to be just as effective as most of the other marketing techniques I had spent time working on. If I only spent some more time on this it could have yielded a few more votes.

In a brilliant moment through the week I thought I would try to use Sponsored Gmail Ads to target people getting emails from Producthunt.com (At least they already have a PH account) to announce we were launching on the day! Images and ads were created, time was spent but we had to wait for the last moment to get the Final Url to send the users to. In the confusion and Launch Limbo period I had to change the Final URL 2 times on each ad, resulting in all but one ad getting banned by the AdWords gods and ruining a great idea. The campaign did run late after taking more than 3–4 hours to get approved with a single ad but the impact of this was delayed and not as effective as it could have been, bummer :(

Where are we at?

It is now 6 hours into our launch window and we have only managed to garner 25 votes and a few comments. The top voted startups were already at 100+ votes. It wasn’t looking good for us. We were not even on the first page for Product Hunters to discover Waylo. We have been promoting a custom search link (https://www.producthunt.com/search?q=waylo) as this was a suggestion from a Product Hunt How to? Article we had read. It unfortunately sends the users to a page that has a number of products on it, and for those that have never heard of PH before it is confusing. It was hours before we received this tweet from @ProductHunt:

At which point we started frantically changing the public URL’s we were sharing to the Product Link…So much for all of that great research we did.

Late in the Day

It was getting late in the day and we were at 77 votes, just barely hanging on to 14th place, and we are running out of ideas. In fact our day was filled with these moments. At 25 votes I sent a message to my wife in the middle of the night “This is going terrible!” of course it wasn’t but I didn’t know any better. At 56 votes I felt like there was no way we were going to get any more votes, we were stuck. Then we rallied….and stopped again. How are we going to get more votes?

We planned on running a FB campaign, and sponsor our video post…the FB ad review gods were against us as well. It went into the queue for approval and was finally approved the morning after the launch was finished (note to self next time do this early).

In hindsight, it was probably a blessing in disguise that the ads didn’t get approved. It is a remarkable feeling Waylo got upvotes just from being on the front page of Product Hunt

How did we end up?

After the end of a long, long day which included only a couple hours of sleep for anyone the clock ticked to midnight and our Official Launch was over. We successfully ended up with an amazing 103 upvotes and #12 of 37 hunted projects, and learned so much. What an experience!

What worked?

• Personal Network Marketing
• Promoted Tweets announcing our Launch targeting PH and Hackernews followers
• Responding quickly to comments on our PH product page and interacting with the community.
• Have someone in Australia, or Japan or some way of targeting that side of the planet early

What didn’t?

• Facebook ads that need to get approved on the day. Do this days before and be ready to change the URL as soon as you have it.
• Gmail ads this is another one that needs to happen ASAP it didn’t work for us but perhaps if it was approved early enough we could have got some traction.

Final thoughts

Enjoy the experience. It is a rollercoaster, but be present and active. The effort you put in will earn you votes but more importantly the feedback will make your product better. The Product Hunt community doesn’t lie, one of the endearing qualities is honesty. Take on all comments as a way to make your product better. So after getting a bit of well earned sleep, get up and get back on the hustle.