A comprehensive guide to launching on Product Hunt

What is Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a free online platform where startup owners launch their products daily, gaining attention from platform users, other startup founders, and customers.

You can vote for each product, and the more votes (upvotes) a product gets, the higher it rises in the rankings.

Additionally, Product Hunt is a large software catalog where, after launch, a product takes its place in a specific category.

How we started with Product Hunt

First, you need to register on Product Hunt personally. Registering an account on behalf of the product is not allowed. The idea is that it's a community, and, first and foremost, real people who create products are interesting to everyone.

Recommendations:

• Set a real profile picture and don't change it frequently, as others get used to it, and you become recognizable. By the way, you can make a .gif avatar; it catches attention.
• Link your account to LinkedIn and Twitter. Product Hunt will automatically find contacts of your followers from social networks and subscribe them to you on Product Hunt. Thus, your account, even with a small number of followers, will appear more influential.
• Fill in your profile description and add links to your social networks so that people can reach out to you.

Immediately after registration, you are considered a new member of the community and cannot launch a product right away. The idea is to immerse yourself in the community, discussions, and see how everything works. Restrictions are lifted after a week.

Badges, coins, streak days mode - is it necessary?

While you can't launch your product yet, it's better to spend time getting to know Product Hunt. Vote for projects, write thoughtful comments, create discussions, and participate in other users' discussions.

As motivation, you can earn badges (for a funny comment, for finding a bug, if you suggest an interesting product development idea, etc.). Some badges are given by the product owner to whom you wrote a comment. Some are automatically issued according to certain algorithms.

In addition to badges, you can earn coins (if people subscribe to you, if they respond to your comments, or participate in your discussions). Coins cannot be spent, they are not deducted from the balance, etc. They are considered the rating of your account and most likely influence how qualitative your upvote will be considered and how "pumped up" your Product Hunt page is.

You can keep Day Streak Mode based on two parameters: visiting Product Hunt and voting for products. If you keep the power mode (visit and vote every day), your account is perceived by other community members as active, alive, and people start writing to you for the purpose of getting to know you or seeking support on Twitter or LinkedIn. Keeping power mode is not mandatory, but it makes you a noticeable person and quickly expands your community, even if initially with a request to support someone's product on launch day.

Should you launch yourself or through a Hunter?

Hunter is the one who launches a product on Product Hunt, and it can be either the product creator or someone completely unrelated who has been asked to be the hunter.

However, Product Hunt itself recommends doing launches independently. The administration explains that previously, all the hunter's subscribers received email notifications about the product launch. Now there are no email notifications, and only notifications in the Product Hunt dashboard remain, significantly reducing the importance of launching through a hunter.

Ploito was launched by its creators personally:

• First, the account was already pumped up (there were about 200 subscribers, 20 badges, 600 coins), which took just over two months.
• Second, we wanted to keep the launch situation under full control and not depend on the response speed of someone completely unrelated. On the internet, you can find the experience of people who launched through a hunter, and in crucial moments, he either did not respond or responded briefly.

On which day is it better to launch?

It all depends on your goals.

If your goal is to get as much coverage (upvotes, visits to the site, comments, etc.), it's best to launch on the days with the highest traffic on Product Hunt. Traditionally, this is observed on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, as confirmed by both users and the Product Hunt administration, citing traffic distribution statistics.

If the goal is to definitely get the "Top Product" badge, you can launch on weekends, Monday, or Friday. This, of course, does not guarantee anything, but the probability of less competition is there. For example, Ploito's launch was on Tuesday, and there were only 65 products launched in total, while on Friday of the same week, there were only 22.

If you suddenly realize that you want to postpone the launch from Tuesday to Wednesday or Thursday because you saw on social media that someone is launching at the same time, and you're afraid of them, you can always postpone the date. But this idea seems unjustified, as it goes against the essence of Product Hunt. After all, the product should not be afraid of competition and should accept an honest battle.

As for the launch time, the most ideal time is automatically set, and it is 00-01 PST. Only with this time will you have exactly 24 hours for people to vote for your product.

How to plan your launch, create promo, and do you need a video?

So, when your account is slightly pumped up, you've decided how and when you'll launch, you need to add your product to Product Hunt. When creating the product page, you need to enter its name, a short description, a link to the site, your author's comment visible on the launch page, specify the product's social networks, founders' names, pricing policy, bonus for Product Hunt users, and media materials.

Here are a few tips:

• In the short product description, describe your product briefly and to the point. For example, Ploito - a virtual office for remote workers, a clear description. While "Ploito - your assistant in improving team efficiency" is unclear. Descriptions like "your best AI assistant; take your marketing to a new level" are often encountered.
• In the author's comment, don't duplicate information from the site. Highlight key moments of the product, your mission, or tell a bit about how the idea for the product came to you.
• Don't use website screenshots for media! Instead, try adding interface screenshots or some statistics confirming the importance of your product.
• Be sure to create a short video and add it to the media. This greatly helps in getting more valuable feedback than just a "Congratulations."

Remember, you can always change the launch date in the settings.

Once you've scheduled the launch, a hub is created for your product - this is your product's page on Product Hunt, which will remain as in any software catalog. It will store information about creators, the product's social networks, and later display information about alternatives to your product.

What is a teaser, and how to find support

Creating a teaser is crucial for a successful launch on Product Hunt. It's a standard page displaying the product's name and description, allowing you to insert one image or gif on the right. The page adapts to the mobile version.

The teaser page performs two important functions:

• The teaser is displayed in the Coming Soon section.
• Users can subscribe to the teaser page.

This means you can ask people in advance to subscribe to your page so they receive a notification on launch day and can support your product if they like it. This doesn't violate Product Hunt's rules and makes sense overall: you reach out to people, present your product, ask them to subscribe to the page; this is creating a community, which is the platform's goal.

The more support you gather on the teaser page, the more people will be notified about the launch and vote for you on the launch day. You can also assess your chances in advance by seeing the number of subscribers to you and other projects in the Coming Soon section.

To garner community support, you can do the following:

• Write about your product on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Telegram, etc.), where Product Hunt users gather, and ask them to subscribe to the teaser (try to keep it short and to the point).
• Start or join discussions with other Product Hunt members. When you have a teaser, a Coming Soon badge appears next to your name, creating additional visibility for your product as other users can subscribe to your teaser by seeing your comments.
• Initiate discussions on Product Hunt, informing about the upcoming launch of your product and asking to subscribe to the teaser.
• Write to those participants who have already contacted you on social media and asked for support. Now is their time to support you.
• Don't spam; you might get blocked on LinkedIn or Twitter, which would be fatal on launch day. Write steadily, spread it over weeks.
• In general, talk about your launch, engage, engage, engage!
• Remember, you don't have to secure all the votes for your product. You just need to help it secure a top position, and then it will fight on its own, and that's when it makes sense!

How did the launch begin?

Most importantly, be prepared for everything. Ploito didn't launch automatically, even though everything was set up correctly. At the appointed time, it became available for voting, but there was a small gray circle next to the logo with the Pre-launched status. The status had to be manually changed, and before that, a message had to be sent to support. In general, if you're prepared for this, it's not scary. Dealing with the launch of Ploito took less than 10 minutes.

In the first 4 hours, products are not fixed in specific positions, and the vote count is not displayed, ensuring equal visibility conditions for all products. After this time, products are secured in the list based on the number of upvotes. It's crucial to get the maximum number of upvotes during this period to secure the product in the top five positions and be visible to Product Hunt visitors throughout the day. To achieve this, you need to reach out to those people whose support you count on primarily. Afterward, the product enters open competition, but unfortunately, it's not always fair.

How we secured a Top-3 spot and fought against fraud

We secured a top-3 spot in the first 4 hours, which was an excellent result. However, suddenly, products below us started to press. Thanks to the resource Hunted Space (@hunteddotspace, we recommend adding your product to their site and following them on Twitter), where we added our product in advance, we saw on the dashboard how the number of votes for another product spiked (from 0 to 150).

As time passed, votes grew unnaturally and very quickly, and all comments from voters were limited to short congratulations without valuable content. Moreover, 80% of the voters were "new community members," with a history of activity consisting of two entries: "registered" and then voted for a single product.

We contacted the Product Hunt administration with a detailed description of the situation and attached screenshots. The administration assured us that they have good algorithms for checking motivated traffic or bots and that the check would be conducted by the end of the launch. They also responded that attracting your community does not contradict Product Hunt's rules.

However, a little later, the algorithms worked, and the products where votes were growing unnaturally quickly took places below ours but with a higher number of votes. This is why it's essential to ensure support from a genuinely active and authoritative Product Hunt community, rather than just attracting newcomers who have just registered.

This way, we secured our third place and received the "Product of the Day" award. Therefore, it's crucial to be prepared for such a situation, contact Product Hunt support in case of questions, and be able to stand up for your product.

Results: was it worth spending time on Product Hunt?

• 3rd place and the "Product of the Day" award, which is excellent for the reputation of developers and the product.
• Around 1000 visits on the launch day and in the following days.
• 700 followers on our product's Product Hunt page and comments from experienced entrepreneurs.
• 200 comments with valuable advice on promotion.
• 10 registrations.
• We indexed and experienced a two-fold increase in organic traffic.
• We entered several software catalogs and received visits from there.
• We learned about competitors we didn't know before.

Here's a screenshot from the Product Hunt dashboard:

And most importantly, we derived immense pleasure, and that alone makes it worthwhile!

We hope our experience proves valuable and helpful for you. Also, we have a short video clip where, in 2 minutes, you'll learn the most important things about Ploito!