What Should be Considered When Launching Product Hunt and Our First Launch Experience
In this article, I will share with you our first launch in Product Hunt and what we have done in the processes leading to it. In this post, I will also refer to details from Jim Raptis’s PH Launch Checklist.
Let’s say you start collecting ideas about the product, first of all, what you need is to display this to people’s awareness, in other words, to create an audience. There are different ways to do this, you can contact people on subreddits, Frontier, you can get in touch with people on YC Forum, etc. I think one of the important things is to have a build-in-public production process, you can share the design stages and development processes of the product with people via Twitter threads. Try to gather comments and recognition.
At this point, you need to be active in Product Hunt, using the products of other makers and giving them constructive feedback will increase your awareness and interest in you. During the launch, you will need the attention of others.
If you can plan your launch date, it is also a logical move to share it with people about 2 weeks in advance, so you will increase people’s interest in the product. We announced that we will be on Product Hunt with Horae on March 14, so we tried to generate interest.
Well, you have done all these things, time flies and you are preparing the product on the other hand. Do not expect everything to be perfect in the design of the product in this process, it is natural and correct for something to develop along the way. As your users love something, they will show you this with their concern. As Michael Seibel said, just quickly remove and launch your MVP.
Time continued to flow rapidly, 1 week left to your launch date, you need to speed up now. At Product Hunt, you have to be online and contacting people every day. It is also very important to find your Hunter, our hunter in Horae was Jim, the producer of Product Hunt Checklist, also. We can definitely say that it boosted us and increased the effect, thanks a lot to him.
Description of launch via PreviewHunt is also important, you have to put it together now, this is a 3rd party app. Of course, you need appropriate keywords for explanations, you can use one of the keyword detector apps for this.
If you have collected a mailing list before, it is time to inform your users. Tell them about your launch and pull them to Product Hunt. Remember, there are investors inside and they are looking to invest.
By the way, it can be very useful to prepare a video for your product, if you can, because it is much easier to explain things with video and sometimes it is not possible to understand business ideas by looking at pictures.
You need to prepare another Twitter thread, now it’s time for you to announce which problem you solved, especially when the launch time is approaching.
Now a day is left to your Launch, drop your zip on PreviewHunt to your Hunter and ask it to publish for you. Do not worry, you can pre-set the time for launch. Also, be careful with the time, I guess I don’t need to say that you have to launch at 12:01 at night, of course at San Francisco time.
You should now announce that the launch will be tomorrow following your tweets already shared on social media. Then it is time to waiting for the Launch.
The moment the Launch has arrived, all you need to do throughout the day is to keep your connections alive and give respectful answers to people who are interested in commenting on your product. In this way, you will keep the engagement high. This will naturally affect your ranking.
You can inform the users on your mailing list that you are in Product Hunt that day, but tell them that you are in a live competition at that moment, and this will attract their attention to Product Hunt. You should be kind to people, on the one hand, you should examine the products of other makers who launched that day and give feedback, first of all, the community comes.
Of course, there is a much more detailed checklist prepared and published by Jim, if you want to examine it in order of importance and complexity, you can also find it here.
So, what did we do?
Frankly, with Horae, we finished the day at 10th ranking, and we collected 201 upvotes. It was our first launch, we consider ourselves successful.
We will be in Product Hunt for Brig Note on Sunday, March 21st, our goal is to be in the top 5 of the day. If you too would like to support us, you are invited to Product Hunt on Sunday, you can easily follow me and my teammate;
