Launching on Product Hunt is a great opportunity to make your product known in the Western market. Additionally, a successful launch increases chances for networking and potential acquaintances with investors and funds.It’s advisable to consider launching as a marketing project, which may generate traffic, bring sales, or create a community around your product. Approaches to the launch realization are similar to those we take to projects. The first step is to define the purpose, and then you get your homework done. After that, you generate traffic in a certain time, and finally, you estimate the results.
Define your launch purpose
Like with any other project, you need to define your goal first. What do you need Product Hunt for?
The answer will help you understand what will be a successful launch for you, whether you need to get a certain quantity of votes and try to become the Product of the day or you will be happy with other results.
We at xTiles decided that our first intention is getting quality traffic and increase the flow of registrations. We needed this to get reviews from new users and understand:
- the audience’s mood,
- expectations,
- desires.
That would also help us decide how to develop our services. That’s why we weren’t after a certain amount of votes and focused on getting traffic on our Product Hunt page. And, let’s face it, we wanted to beat the services that launched PH earlier we considered to be our competitors.
Product “packaging”
The first thing you need to do is pack your product so the audience can easily understand what you’re offering and why they need it. In some cases, that won’t cause much trouble. But with xTiles it was no easy task. Since we create a horizontal service, to show the audience what can be done in xTiles, we would need to describe 1000 and 1 use cases. So, we decided to go to our users to ask what exactly they get from using xTiles. After analyzing more than 20 interviews, we devised our slogan –
“organize ideas & projects visually”.
As you can see, it consists of two big concepts, where the organization of notes, tasks, links, pictures, etc. – is the main job, and the visual component of the process is our advantage.
So, according to our positioning and the portrait of our target audience (this was the result of the interviews as well), we updated our website, created a library of templates, and worked out the onboarding process for new users. That was our homework, without which, we believe, there’s no reason to start your launch on Product Hunt.
Audience attraction
In a nutshell, communicate as much as you and the team can. However, you need to consider where you want to bring your audience and what to do with it. Let all those conversations lead to positive results.
It’s advisable to create a relevant upcoming page to increase the chances your launch will be successful. This page allows you to collect the email addresses of those interested in your product and communicate with them directly on the PH website.
We started to collect the audience approximately a month before the launch date. How and where have we done that?
1. We searched for different thematic communities on IndieHakers, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and Slack and wrote to them.
2. We interacted with the Product Hunt community.
3. We brought our own contacts.
4. We searched for bloggers who were interested in working with us.
5. And, of course, we involved a Hunter.
We were lucky enough to have among our first users the influencers who supported our launch. And yes, we interacted with all our users (around 3000 then) using emails and banners.
This step is time-consuming, with lots of details and small actions, so don’t forget to distribute the responsibility zones among the team members.
The Launch Day
For any team, the launch day is super important and emotionally intense. You need to prepare to ensure everything’s going according to your plan. Here is what worked for us.
1. Let everyone have their own jurisdiction and be responsible for certain social media, reviews, email communications, etc. That would be a day you need to write and communicate a lot, and scripts prepared beforehand would be a huge advantage.
2. I personally believe that we were pretty annoying on the launch day. People who subscribed to the upcoming page got a few emails that day, which definitely led to us getting votes. We were focused on the results entirely.
3. Take into consideration your time zone. A launch starts at 10 am Kyiv time, and if you’re determined to reach first place during the day, it’s important to seize the leadership once the voting starts. So, the morning hours were the most active for us.
Additional Suggestions
1. Define the launch day in advance, but give the team and yourself the time for preparation.
2. Use others’ experience to your advantage. You can find guides, lists of communities, and use cases on the internet, which may be beneficial for your start. However, always keep in mind what your product and capabilities are. No matter what you find on the internet, it’s rather a list of suggestions and not instructions you need to follow blindly.
3. The PH audience likes special treatment, so prepare special offers only for them that no one else will have access to.
4. Don’t stop communicating with your audience after the day of the launch is over. This attitude helped us become the 2nd product of the month.
5. The idea of getting in touch with the PH owner may be great, but you can’t be sure it will work. Up to 20 startups launch daily, and everyone wants them to write about their product. So, go for it only if your idea is super creative and innovative.
6. Don’t try to cheat with blocks because PH algorithms can see that.
7. In our experience, algorithms take into account who votes (a newcomer or a person with a high-level account). So, you must choose your audience carefully and watch whether their support increases evenly. Sudden jumps and distortions won’t do any good.
Results
Our work brought us the following results:
1. xTiles became the Product of the Day, the Product of the Week, and the 2nd Product of the Month.
2. We got 2 700+ votes
3. We got 715 comments
4. On the launch day and the month after, we got more than 2000 registrations.
And most importantly, our launch on PH gave us a powerful impetus for developing and a better understanding our product.
Summing Up
Launch on Product Hunt is a complicated marketing project where you must see the team’s work from different angles. Sub-projects, responsibilities of each team member, and time and the number of days of the launch are the elements of teamwork you need to be aware of constantly.
Maybe we were lucky, or maybe we created the service that helped us achieve the results because we used xTiles for the whole project, all our plans, team storming, and notes.
P. S. Well-organized teamwork was the main factor that made us reach the top 5 product launches on Product Hunt in 2022.
