Top 7 Product Hunt Best Practices For A Successful Launch Campaign
So you want to have a successful launch on Product Hunt?…Well, who doesn’t?! Our team recently went through the whole process and finished with some pretty interesting takeaways from this unique experience. I’ll walk you through some key steps and strategies that allowed our app Ulli, a smart browser for mobile, to receive the most upvotes on the days of its launch, and eventually get nominated for 2016 Mobile App of the Year as part of the Golden Kitty Awards! 😻🏆
But before we dive into the details, let’s quickly cover some basics.
What is Product Hunt?
In case you’ve been living under a rock, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered.
Product Hunt was originally developed in 2013 by Ryan Hoover, who was in search of a one-stop destination to discover new tech products. Sick and tired of bouncing from site to site, he designed Product Hunt to foster a tight-knit community of like-minded people who were in search of hottest new tech. As Ryan puts it, it’s a way for people to “geek out” on what’s new and cool.
Today, Product Hunt is the place to launch not only tech products, but also books, podcasts and games. It gives anyone the chance to showcase their cool idea in front of a large, knowledgeable, and engaged audience.
Each day, hundreds of new products are submitted to Product Hunt, which the community can upvote. The products with the most upvotes combined with the site’s secret algorithm are featured on the front page, giving top submissions credibility within the community and maximum exposure. Just to give you an idea, public relations tool Muckrack says there are more than 728,000 unique monthly visitors on Product Hunt, showing the site’s extensive reach.
And the most upvoted products of the day receive even more exposure the following day, as they are featured in Product Hunt’s daily newsletter which hundreds of thousands of subscribers receive!
However, launching on Product Hunt isn’t as simple as submitting your product to the site. It takes serious preparation to nail the ultimate launch on the site. If done well, you can get great traction, and amplify one of the most crucial moments for your company and product. What’s more, the community is full of early adopters 🕵️, curious investors 🤑, and similar entrepreneurs ✌️ — three core demographics to target during a launch.
Before jumping into your Product Hunt launch campaign, it is important to refine your product’s pitch. We went through many variations, testing different ways to get our key points across. We found the most effective way to reach our audience was by highlighting the problem first. In our case, we showed people the pain of using the Internet on a mobile device: small keyboard, making typos, complicated gestures, two-hands needed. We then followed by explaining how our smart browser Ulli alleviated these common pains and turned the mobile searching experience into a seamless and intuitive one.
Now that you have a clear understanding of what’s at stake, remember you only launch once, and that is why you should go all in with your Product Hunt campaign.
Here are 7 best practices that led to our success:
1) Sign up. Observe. Play.
Yes, this may seem like an obvious thing to do, but it’s seriously well worth your time. If you’re new to the site, sign up for Product Hunt before your actual launch and learn the nuts and bolts of the site. Product Hunt is a unique platform that hosts a very unique crowd of early adopters, so it’s essential that you understand how it works and how people engage with it.
You’ll learn the most by immersing yourself into the site and diving head-first. This will allow you to understand everything ranging from the basics to the unique particularities of the site and the community.
To start, if you haven’t yet, create your account and perform basics like read the FAQ, fill out your profile and register for the Product Hunt newsletter. Go through site to learn first-hand how key features like upvotes work, as well as the other buttons on a product launch page.
Once you have the site’s functions and layout down, it’s time to do a little research on how similar products to yours launched on Product Hunt.
You should examine things from similar products and general leaders like: introduction, wording, keywords, comments, and tone.
To help you further understand the site, here is the terminology you must know before launching on Product Hunt:
- Upvote: When you like a product, you can give it an upvote, just of like a “thumbs up”! The more upvotes a product receives on the day of it launch, the better chance it has to be on the top of the front page.
- Maker: The person or people who created the submitted product, typically from the company of the product. It is not required to have a maker, but I highly recommend you include the people who helped build the product.
- Hunter: Without a hunter, forget it, you cannot post to Product Hunt. The site only allows hunters to post new products so it is important you have one lined up for your launch day. In order to become a hunter, you need a special invite from another hunter or administrative figure.
2) Find the right Hunter to post for you
Finding the right person to hunt you (aka post your product for you) is like starting a race 100 meters ahead of everyone else. When hunters submit a new product, all their followers are instantly notified. And if the hunter has a large amount of followers, well you guessed it, the chances of rapidly catapulting to the top of the leaderboard rises exponentially.
Our criteria finding someone was simple and all the info we needed was easily found on the hunter’s Product Hunt profile page.
Your hunter must:
- Have a large number of followers and substantial influence within the Product community.
- Have a history of previous successful posts on Product Hunt.
- Be interested in our type of product/vertical — in our case, an AI mobile product.
After reading tons of articles and dissecting Product Hunter leaderboards (yes, those really exist), I came across an interesting blog post by a hunter called Bram Kanstein. He explained in a step-by-step process how to pitch him your product so that he would hunt it on Product Hunt. After a little more research, I found that Bram not only had more than 20,000 followers on Product Hunt, but also launched the #1 most upvoted product of all time, AND had recently hunted an AI product that had similarities with Ulli.
We hit the trifecta, and he became one of our top targets!
I meticulously followed his tips from his blogpost to pitch him, and came up with this:
The next morning, Bram emailed me back telling me he would be happy to help and gave me a list of things to send him prior to our Product Hunt launch.
It was a go!
3) Prepare the essentials
Once you’ve secured a hunter, it’s time to start preparing the basic information for your big launch day on Product Hunt. This is your opportunity to stand out by putting a creative twist on what would be general mundace product information. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box in order to attract people to your page.
Your hunter will be posting on your behalf, so you’ll want to make it easy for him/her to enter your information. I recommend creating a document with the below information that your hunter can easily copy and paste into the appropriate fields:
- Name of the product: Make sure you enter the exact name of your product as it appears in a shop or online (website, appstore, playstore) to help hunters easily find it.
- Tagline (under 60 characters): This is important because the tagline (along with your product name and logo) is a key element that will draw people to click on your post from the site’s homepage. Explain your product in simple and basic terms, so that someone can quickly understand what you do even while scrolling down the page. This is one area you don’t want to be overly creative in, because it could end up confusing people in the end.
- Logo: You can simply provide your logo, or for a more engaging approach, you can create a custom GIF to stand out from the rest. This has become quite a trendy thing to do on Product Hunt recently, as the subject of their daily newsletter the following day fittingly read: “GIFs are the new elevator pitch”. We created a nifty little gif that combined our spinning logo with part of our marketing video (see below) to catch people’s attention scanning the front page.
- Correct URLs: Your website URL, plus the App Store & Play Store URLs if applicable. If you don’t have a website, you can create a simple landing page hunters can visit with general information about your product and a link to download it if applicable.
- Topics: This is used to help categorize your product within Product Hunt. Look at what similar products used for topics to give you an idea. For example, we looked at other browsers and AI products that had previously been posted to Product Hunt to help us come up with a complete and comprehensive list.
- Add screenshots: People are visual by nature, so it is imperative you add screenshots of your product. If you have a video, I recommend you add it too. Your goal should be to transmit information about your product in the quickest and simplest way, and a video does just that. We placed our video as the first screenshot (it autoplays too!) in order to get the message across fast.
- Prepare opening comment: Make sure you create an intro comment beforehand to add when the post is live on Product Hunt. The comment should be personable and brief, with core information about your product and company. Be sure to explain why you built your product, and describe what kind of feedback you’re looking for. Don’t forget to thank the hunter if one hunts you!
- Makers: Make sure the team members who are considered the makers all have a personal account on Product Hunt and list their profile handles for your hunter to add them to the product post. The profiles will inherit from the picture of the Twitter or Facebook account associated with them so make sure to chose one that doesn’t make you look like a lunatic.
- Date and time (PST) when you want to get hunted: Product Hunt’s servers are adjusted for PST and the site refreshes its products for the next day starting at midnight. To maximize your exposure and visibility, get hunted after midnight (PST time), so that you are live on the site for almost 24 hours. We ended up posting around 3am PST and stayed up all night tracking our upvotes — a little caffeine and the pure excitement of finally posting on Product Hunt was enough to keep us awake the whole night.
4) Customize your website for the big day
When you are live on Product Hunt, it’s your time to shine, so don’t hold back! Think of creative ways to maximize the amount of people that see your post. We decided to redirect people to our Product Hunt page from our website with a simple custom banner.
It was branded with the Product Hunt colors to really make our message and intentions stand out. Our dev team created the banner, but there are also sites out there that can help you easily create one. We also made a GIF with the Product Hunt cat wearing Ulli glasses, which flashed on and off the cat (Pro tip: Product Hunt LOVES cats 😺…and goats 🐐 too!)
5) Make Hunters feel special
If you want to attract people to your page and product, a special offer exclusively for Product Hunters can be a huge difference maker.
This offer can come in many forms, including discounts for paid products, exclusive access to beta lists, or even just a simple prize.
Important note: If you make an exclusive offer for Product Hunters, it should not be dependent on them upvoting your product. Product Hunt makes it clear you cannot ask and incentivize people to vote for you, so it has to be clear that your offer is in no way tied to getting upvotes.
In our case, we were launching our finalized product and it was free. So, we decided to do a simple giveaway exclusive to Product Hunters in order to spread the love and increase brand awareness. And with our giveaway, everyone who played was a winner! Once someone went to our Product Hunt page and clicked on “Get It”, they would be redirected to our site and see a custom banner specially made for people who came directly from Product Hunt.
By clicking “WIN MAGICAL PRIZE” on the banner, Product Hunters were directed to a giveaway game our dev team created (see screenshot below). Product Hunters who played (remember, everyone was a winner) were awarded either a Ulli branded shirt, stickers, or sunglasses — the same glasses from the cat GIF we created for our website’s custom banner.
The giveaway was designed to be simple, fast and shareable. This is why we decided to implement a slot machine, which is explicit by nature and easy to play.
If you decide to do any sort of giveaway, don’t forget to add terms and conditions! It’s mandatory!
Pro Tip: We asked players to connect with their Twitter or Facebook account, and built a mechanism which kept a running list of each user that played. This way it guaranteed that no one could play twice and win multiple prizes.
6) Ready? It’s finally time to spread the word!
When your product is finally live on the site, it’s time to gather the troops and spread the word to show off your hard work! During this stage of the game, communication is key in order to drive and maximize traffic to your page. Leverage your network and ask them for feedback on what you’ve built. This includes family, friends, and any other connections you think would be interested in your product. You should email all your friends, post across your social media channels, and contact your users if you have their approval.
Of course, it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that you shouldn’t spam people. Not good for your karma. As I mentioned earlier in my introduction, Product Hunt was built with the goal of making product discovery easy, rather than allowing companies to force feed their product to whoever, and that’s what makes the platform so good at making the best products shine.
Oh, and when reaching out to people, don’t forget to send them a link to Product Hunt so they can find your product!
Make the most of your day: maximize your communication strategy
Think of ways to creatively engage with people during the day and after. This can help amplify the reach of your Product Hunt campaign, and drive even more people to your page.
Within the giveaway game, we prepared automated Tweets and Facebook posts winners could easily share at the tap or click of a button to help get the word out about our Product Hunt campaign. All the posts had a link to the Product Hunt home page, our Twitter handle @Biggerpan and hashtagged the word “Ulli”. This allowed us to keep track of the winners’ posts so we could share them across our social media channels to help create more buzz. We also included and tagged Product Hunt in some of our automated posts, in hopes they would retweet it on Twitter or like it on Facebook.
This sharable content works well for all other special Product Hunter offers. For example, you can place an automated post button after a Product Hunter purchases your product, or signs up for it via Product Hunt. This can help create awareness about your Product Hunt campaign on social media.
Here are some examples of the Tweets we prepared for people to share:
In total, there were more than 200 giveaway winners, and it helped us gain more visibility in a fun and creative way. The next week, we mailed a custom hand signed note by our CEO to each winner. This helped us establish a relationship with some of our very first users who seemed to enjoy it.
If you want to learn more about communications guidelines, I recommend you to read the “Five things everyone should know about Product Hunt”. 👌
7) Have your coffee and answers ready
From the second your product is live on Product Hunt, be prepared to quickly answer any and all questions in comment section of your page. We had someone awake around the clock (remember, we were hunted at 3am PST), closely monitoring for new comments and questions. Be prepared to answer all types questions, even technical ones. We created a schedule to ensure that someone from the dev team was always awake and available to answer technical questions during this marathon campaign.
Don’t forget that the comment section is a public place, so always answer users in a positive way. Respect everyone’s comments and treat everyone the same.
After Product Hunt launch ended, we remembered to follow up with people who had asked particular questions. For example, we received many questions about when our smart browser Ulli would be available in the their country’s App Store. Since our launch, we have rolled out in all App Stores worldwide. Even if it was a month later, we contacted them personally via Twitter letting them know that Ulli was now available in their country. These people seemed to really appreciate us remembering their question and it helped solidify a relationship with each one.
Product Hunt is full of surprises
After being featured on the front page of Product Hunt from the start, and going neck and neck with Google’s new VR product, we finished as the top hunt of the day!
After this successful launch, we received an email from Product Hunt months later notifying us we had been nominated for 2016 Mobile App of the Year at the Golden Kitty Awards!
We were back on Product Hunt again, and couldn’t have been happier! 😺 We finished in the Top 5 Mobile Apps of 2016 alongside some well-recognized names like Duolingo and Prisma.
If you have any feedback, or questions about your upcoming launch, I would love to hear from you!
Interested in giving Ulli a try? The Smart Web Browser for Mobile is available for Download on the App Store.
