How we got 800+ upvotes on Product Hunt and made it to #3 product of the day
So we’ve built an awesome no-code platform where anyone can create web and mobile applications without writing code. Sounds cool, right? But how do we take it to the masses, overcome the usual scepticism that you normally encounter when you mention about no-code development.
The must-do for launching new products nowadays is getting hunted on Product Hunt. This will give you a chance to expose your product to a huge audience of tech-savvy, geeky and loyal people who can become early adopters or who can provide a very valuable feedback in a positive and friendly manner even if it’s any kind of criticism. But how to the Product Hunt launch right? We’ve done it a few times before with the latest hunt of Zeroqode being the most successful one so far. So we’d like to share you some tips and hints of how to get the most of your Product Hunt launch.
Quick overview of our results from Product Hunt launch.
As you can see from the Google Analytics screenshot below, we’ve got a significant boost in traffic to our web-site.
This led to a big number of on-site interactions through Intercom’s live chat widget, where people were asking about the no-code templates that we build, course that help to learn about building apps without code and a very cool solution for converting existing web-sites into native iOS & Android Apps.
A few days after the launch, one very influential writer in Saudi Arabia tweeted to his 200K+ followers about Zeroqode and that brought another influx of traffic from the Middle Eastern Region.
We still keep receiving traffic from Product Hunt. It’s not as huge as during the launch, something about 100 users per week. Overall in 1 month since the launch of Product Hunt we have received about 3500 unique visitors directly from Product Hunt and another couple of thousands from other media channels.
What you need to know before the launch.
- Get all of your team signed up on PH.
You will need that to spread the word about the launch on the target date, plus you will have more people hanging around being able to respond to the questions when they come. - It’s recommended not to launch(Hunt) the product yourself, but instead to ask one of the Product Hunt top hunters to help.
In that case all their subscribers will get the notification which would give you a good leverage against other Product Hunts on that day… We asked Bram Kanstein, the founder of Startup Watching, to help us out. - Picking the right time to hunt your product is also crucial.
The recommended hunt time is between 2:30am to 7:00 am PST. We’ve done ours at 3:30am PST. - Never ask for upvotes, anywhere.
You can share the URL to the post, but please let your users decide if they like what you’ve made. You can simply ask them to join the discussion or share their feedback and comments. That would be more appropriate. - Answer questions on the PH thread as soon as possible. Reply and upvote them for taking the time to give you feedback and look at your site.
- Prepare the short intro comment from yourself in advance.
More suggestions:
Send tweets to people who upvote you. They’re doing a huge favor to you, be thankful and they’ll remember you.
Also, read How to Launch on Product Hunt post to get more info.
Now here is our checklist of things that we’ve done to prepare for the launch:
Info that is necessary for PH post:
1. Name of the product
2. Correct URL (+ App/Play Store urls)
3. Tagline (under 60 characters)
4. Your personal Product Hunt profile url — you will be the maker and get commenting access so you can explain more about the product in the first comment.
5. Screenshots and/or a Youtube video (link) and avatar. We did an animated gif logo. It was an attractive element on the page. Look at it!
6. Determine launch date and time with your hunter.
Create welcome message on the site for hunters.
We did it through the Intercom app. Intercom is a great tool for live chat communications with your site visitors.
You can automate many different interaction scenarios depending on various conditions or user behaviour. If you think Intercom is out of your budget (like we thought initially) you might consider their Early Stage offering that gives a great price for new startups during their first year of Intercom use. We tried Drift, Crisp and other tools but nothing compared to Intercom in quality, functionality and ease of use.
Create a targeted Ad Post on FB about Product Hunt Launch.
Besides Zeroqode we have other websites which are related to no-code development. For example Bubblewits (now known as Zeroqode Development) is our brand for no-code development services. Or Builtwithoutcode is a collection of apps built without code as the name suggests. :) We used Facebook Pixel in those websites that tracks all Facebooks visitors and remembers them. This allows configuring Facebook Retargeting campaigns which will be shown only to the Facebook users who visited our websites before. This is supposed to increase the efficiency of Facebook campaigns as those users already have an idea of what the no-code development is all about.
Post in all social networks your company is represented at.
So, we posted our news about Product Hunt Launch on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & Instagram. Also, you can post intermediate results and share several photos & data.
Send an Email with link to your product hunt page.
Don’t underestimate the good old Email marketing. Send an email to your subscribers and announce your Product Hunt Launch.
Make sure you set up Google Analytics event tracking.
We created several events to track Clicks on Free Templates Button, Clicks on Buy Template Button & Preview Templates.
We suggest to add those events that are relevant to your business, of course. It is a great option to understand your customers behaviour and to measure campaign performance.
Сreate and publish a blog post about Product Hunt launch.
On launch day post an announcement to attract and engage your audience. It is better to do this post as short as you can and to add an eye catching image. Here’s the link to our blog post on how we did it.
Of course, don’t forget to reach out to friends and friends of friends that would give you that initial push during the launch ASAP, to get it closer to the top of the daily rating and get more visibility early on. Ask all of them to repost and retweet about your launch so that as many people as possible get to know about it. Our incredible customers, partners and friends were a great help here.
To sum up — launching on PH was a fantastic experience for our team. Along the way it constantly felt like there was something else that is still missing for the proper launch, but we have decided to make sure that at the very least — everything that was planned was completed the best we could, and not before long we saw the #3 Product of The Day badge right next to our post :)
So the recipe is simple:
Build a Great Product, do your Homework right, leverage the power of your network, and be there to keep the conversation with Product Hunt community going to get the best results.
Buy the way, in case you didn’t know yet, Zeroqode has more cool products. Check them out:
Webview — Convert your web app into native iOS & Android.
Backends — Create no-code Backend 10x Faster.
Courses — Learn how to make an app without code in one place.
