Launching on Product Hunt for dummies

How I do my launches — as a 2x Product of the Day winner

Sep 22, 2024

Roses are red,

Violets are blue.

If you don’t know how to launch,

Read this to get a clue.

After all the summer without shipping anything, I finally launched my new app!
My super nichy niche app for surfing athletes that compete is live on the App Store.

Yes, I know, I know.

We are all day reading the same things about Product Hunt…

“There’s no honest feedback, only flattering comments”

“Many products from great makers aren't featured for no reason”

“It is infested with bots”

“Support isn't helpful”

“Product Hunt isn’t cool anymore”

BUT.

It is still the best platform to launch your app.

For 7 reasons:

You get traffic
You get sales
You get backlinks
You improve your SEO/ASO
You get feedback (very few is honest, but it’s something)
Eventually you win a badge — which is nice for marketing
You earn a bunch of followers on 𝕏

I’ve launched 4 projects so far in PH — follow my profile here.

My first two ones didn’t make it to the top 10.

My third one, Marvin, got the 1st position and won the Product of the Day award.

My last one, PhotoCaption, made it to the top 5 and got the 4th badge.

EDIT: It’s now 6 products and I won another Product of the Day 🥳

All of them were organic. No bots. No payed upvotes. No cheating.

As you may know, reaching the top 5 is quite difficult.

PH is flooded of makers launching products everyday ant it’s difficult to stand out.

Follow these advices to have more chances of success 👇

Getting featured

This is the most controversial thing and important one about PH.

All products are accepted for launching on a certain day.

However, only the featured ones appear on PH’s front page and compete for a badge.

You can be the maker with more votes in the day but, if your product isn’t featured, you won’t earn a badge.

The big problem? There’s no magic recipe or a playbook that guarantees you being featured.

And you can see on 𝕏 every week makers complaining about this.

The most resonant example lately was Janu, not being featured with a super viral launch and hundreds of votes.

In order to increase your chances for being featured do this:

Schedule your launch in advance. At least 2 or 3 days.
Create a pre-launch teaser. You’ll find the option once you fill the launch form.
On launch day, be since the minute 1 promoting your launch on 𝕏 and answering EVERY-SINGLE-COMMENT
Pray to Jobs, Musk, Gates, Miyamoto, Miyazaki, levelsio and Jony Ive.
Get lucky 🍀 🤞🏼

When to launch

There is a common rule of thumb, depending on your needs:

Launch on weekend for fighting for the badge
Launch on weekdays to get more traffic

Since Marc Lou made pretty popular these two rules, there are now more people launch on weekends. That being said, it’s still easier to get a top 5 on a weekend since there is definitely less competition.

If you don’t care about the badge, but you want to have more eyeballs spotting your product, on weekdays there is more traffic.

Creating the launch

Well, hit the red Submit button.

Fill out the info:

Product name: ONLY THE NAME, don’t put here additional stuff leveraging the free characters. PH will remove it.
Tagline: here you can be more creative. Be concise. Try to explain your product in few words, grabbing attention. Don’t show features, show benefits, problems to solve…
Product icon: you can use a gif here, but it only will animate on hovering the cursor. This was a nice hack before, as it was animating all time, but it isn’t that important anymore.
Gallery: VERY IMPORTANT. This the first one thing that people will see when they enter in your product’s page. Create one thumbnail image with Opengraph’s proportions (1200x630) that will be also used as image when you share your launch link. Upload 4 or 5 more images showcasing your product.
Video demo: MANDATORY — if you want to have any chances of success. A video of yourself showcasing your product. You have to appear on the video explaining it. This is not optional. If you don’t like it, as we say in Spanish, ‘te jodes’. Step out of your comfort zone and make it anyways, no matter what. No one likes to record videos, it’s a bitter pill we all have to swallow. The more you do it, the more you’ll get used to it. You can use Screen Studio to record amazing ones.
Shoutouts: This is a nice opportunity to plug some of your fellow makers products.

Launch day 🚀

Product Hunt launches start at 12:01am Pacific Time and end at 11:59pm.

This means that you have to be ready for that time, no matter your time zone.

The first hours are crucial to gain votes and appear on top.

Rankings are not revealed on the first hours so the products appear unsorted in the beggining.

However, you can track how products are performing on Hunted Space.

Before the launch starts, you have to be prepared with:

A nice and curated tweet. Not too short, not too long.
A cool promo video. This is now a standard nowadays thanks to Marc Louvion.
A livestream set up on HuntCaster. If you do this, your product livestream will appear on top of your followers feed on 𝕏 during all the launch day. It’s a cool hack to earn some extra upvotes.

Ok.

The launch day started.

You tweeted your amazing post with a video.

You switched on your product hunt live stream.

You got featured.

Now is when you start to answer every tweet, every quote, every comment on PH — even you answer your mom’s messages.

You spend ALL DAY engaging with everyone as if you were mad.

You reach 100 votes? You tweet “Amaziiing I got 100 votes 🚀 [screenshot]”

Rankings are revealed? You tweet “Amaziiing rankings are revealed 🚀 [screenshot]”

Ok, I think you got it.

I know, it’s kind of cringy. But it is what it is, that’s how it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here you have some examples of my launch tweets and another good ones: