In the past 8 months, we are featured in Product Hunt newsletter twice, and named Product of the Day once. A lot of my entrepreneur friends have been asking me how to launch on product hunt. Here are a few things I learned during my launches.
What is Product Hunt and why should you care?
First of all, the goal of any launch is to get customers. You have spent months building and refining your products. Now it is time to get your first group of customers. You are an entrepreneur and you don’t have much marketing budget. How do you do it? Product hunt may be a good place for you to launch your product.
PH is the place of many early adopters and tech enthusiasts. They are more open to new tech and more tolerate for imperfect products, and PH has over 4M monthly users. So if you have a product and you want to get some early adopters, PH is a great place to launch.
How to prepare for it?
PH already provides a detailed list of materials you need provide in order to launch, like video, illustration, and etc. You can find it here. I will not repeat what is already listed there, but only share a few things I learned myself.
· Build a good product. I cannot emphasize this enough. A good product is not just important for a successful launch, but also the foundation of your business. Don’t rush to launch until your product is ready. Find a least 10 people to try your product, collect that feedback, and refine your product until people like it.
· Messaging is key. Many great products fail to gain attraction, simply because the messaging doesn’t work. Ask people in your target segment to read your website, watch your demo video, and see if they get excited about it. Certainly make sure you have a great video and illustration when you launch on PH.
· Happy customers. Many companies launch on product hunt when they already have thousands of happy customers and followers. This gives them great advantages when they launch. If you also have a group of happy customers, contact them and ask for their support. This will greatly increase your chance to be featured.
How long should you prepare for it?
It depends where you are on your product. If you already have a great product and many happy customers, you can launch anytime you want. In our most recent launch, we only spent a couple of days to prepare the required materials, and then we launch it.
If you have very limited customers, I recommend you not to rush it and get more customers before you launch. For our very first launch last year, we spent over a month preparing everything. So it really depends on your situation.
When do you launch?
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday have the most traffic, and also are the most competitive date to launch. If you are well prepared, launch on those days so you get more traffic. If not, or you really want to get featured, try weekend where there is much less competition.
Regarding the time to launch, always launch on 12am Pacific Time. It gives you 24 hours to show your product. If you are in US, prepare to drink a lot of coffee.
Do you need a hunter?
It depends.
Technically you can hunt your own product. But I would recommend you find a hunter with many followers if you can. It will greatly increase the number of people seeing your post. This is what we did in our first launch. We had very limited users when we first launch. Luckily, we found a great hunter. It really helped us reach to a lot more people than we could by hunting ourselves.
Certainly, if you already have a large number of happy customers, you can hunt it yourself. That is what we did in our most recent launch. Because we already have thousands of customers, I hunted it myself.
Here are the two launches we did. Feel free to check it out and try our product, Laxis!
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/laxis
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/laxis-ai-meeting-assistant
If you still have more questions or need a hunter, let me know and I am happy to help.
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