How to get featured on product hunt – our case study!

Hey all, I’m Samir Soliman and I’ll take you in a short noncomplicated ride to understand how does Product Hunt works and why you need to be there. First I’m proud to share with you that all of this blog post is a conclusion of the successful experience we had this August with Premast Plus, and we did it once again last week on a different product called Dashi. After getting listed twice in the top five among fierce competition, and as I once was a beginner here is how to launch on Product Hunt for beginners.

We planned the launching of Premast Plus and Dashi Bundle on Product Hunt, and we could achieve our goal of getting featured as the fifth Product of the day. It’s great to have such a page from a platform like PH, but on other levels going through this process had many benefits on our growing products. In this article, we will guide you on how to prepare and what you should consider while creating a launching campaign on product hunt. but first, we need to answer a big question

What is Product Hunt really for?

When looking from an abroad angle, it’s much more than launching products and getting padges. The Product hunt Online Platform gives the opportunity for tech users and makers to share and discover daily new products like websites, tools, mobile, and web apps and provide active space for makers and techies to discuss and share feedback and ideas with each other.

the benefits of being an active member on PH, besides the traffic, you’ll gain, visibility and outreach to your website or your app, the helpful community you will network and engage with, this community includes CEOs, Founders, Product Managers, growth marketers, Web & Mobile Developers, Business Analysts, Experts, Product designers for a lot of large tech Companies & startups worldwide you can Share, test your product and get very useful feedback day by day.

We have a lot of to go over in this article, but I would like to remind you that two months ago, I was a beginner, I knew a little and didn’t try it out yet. Here I’ll share with you how I became a hunter that got his two products featured among the top five products and got mentioned by Product Hunt on Twitter. LETS’ JUMP TO IT;

Process of launching on product hunt

In my launching experience, There are some activities you should consider while planning to launch your product on Product Hunt. That gives you a chance to appear on the home page and get featured among the top #5.

Firstly: I would like to share with you the purpose drove us to launch Premast Plus on PH. Someday when we opened the conversation -in our weekly focus meeting –: “How we can make an effective launching for Premast Plus and make it visible and reach for many and effective users worldwide?” Mo’men -Premast Founder & CEO said.

We recommended a lot of Methods, but all of us agreed and decided to launch it on Product Hunt first. because we are in the beta version and we want to test it and get some effective and helpful feedback from the PH community this is a healthy and useful space to do this, and grow in the Improvement process fast, and you will get unique exposure organically.

So I set with the business & growth team determine our plan to make it a successful launch, and put the first goal to be of top #5 our plan started with 30 days before launching:

Study & Observe:

• What is Product hunt and what are the benefits of launching our products on it
• Our product value proposition and features carefully, and Who is our customers and how we can solve their problems. “check out this article about Premast Plus “
• Our Alternatives, our competitive analysis, and Market.
• How PH works and what is the best practices that should we do.
• What are the popular launching Mistakes that we should avoid.
• Daily launching products and maker activates on PH.
• The best time to post your product.

After that, we get some insights from the result of our study like:

• Your account profile must be clear and well informative and well-designed
• make sure to make it personal for your identity not for your company so put your personal photo, not a logo.
• edit your Cover photo & headline to explain your identity for others.
• add your Formal email and website.
• link it with your twitter to be active in twitter easily.
• in my recommendations to position your personal branding and to be rememberable and present all time don’t change your personal photo regularly it’s not your Instagram.
• Create an account here if you haven’t.
• There are hundreds of daily products submitted on PH with raking competition for 24 hours.
• The launching day starts at 00:01 PST takes care to measure carefully your time zone.
  • There is not accurate best time for launching it depends on your active time for your community and competitive daily situations, the common recommendation you should launch between 00:01 am PST and 02:00 am PST. But some product launch after this time, you can launch later with few upvotes and get in top and revers versa, its algorithms.
  • take care you should balance your launching time between your active community time and competitive situation to give yourself space of time to gain more engagement and be in the same competition line with other top products within your 24hr.

In our case:

the first time we decided to launch “Premast Plus”  at 00:01 am PST it was 9:00 am in our time zone.

we launched at 00:15 because we late in prepare the posting page so take care and prepare it in enough time before launching.

In sec time we launched “dashi” at 02:00 for 2 reasons (Test our community behavior, and test the best time for our products & content with PH algorithms) to improve it in future.

maybe we will decide another launching time in our next launch based on the current situation to know the best practices compatible with us, as we agreed there isn’t an accurate and specific time for launching.

• all product appears in “newest” tab but this is not visible & effective because no more ppl go there.
  most people see “popular” Products first and engage with them.
• But just a few products appear in” Popular” and just the top 5 products get rank badge depends on PH algorithms. If you stuck on the newest page long time although your product got engaged well, you can contact with PH team they’re very helpful.
• PH Ranking Algorithms depend on some Inferred factors such as  (upvotes – community engagement with the product – posting time – and other factors )
• You can hunt your product by yourself or you can contact someone else to hunt it for you, the benefit of submitting your product by a hunter is the hunting experience of the hunter and active communities and followers of hunters that they can reach to quickly, and maybe give your product some attention.
• but a lot of resources, makers, and I: recommend hunting it by yourself to save your time and effort that you’ll spend looking for a hunter that involves a lot of communication. plus, this gives you full control during launching day to communicate well with your community.
• Set a daily time to focus on product hunt activities, follow makers, and upvote products that you are interested in and discuss with product hunt’s community to share and gain feedback and set you to-do list, goals to increase your account’s followers and make it active & high weight account.

Then we divide our plan to 3 main parts  we will share it in steps and our experience & thoughts in each part:

1. Pre-launching

2. Launching day

3. After launching

1- Pre-launching:

In Pre-launch there are some points you should consider as a launching preparation:

• Community: as we agreed above you should engage well with your community, follow makers, and discuss with them your product value and collect feedback to improve your product features.
• Team: teach PH concept and discuss best practices for your team to work together and the benefits of joining the PH community personally, should all create discussions & surveys to collect feedback and ideas about everyone’s fields and your Products too. This helped us in launching day because the engagement with Community was very easy and effective, oh Guys “do it together”.
• Landing Page: to get some early subscribers and collect emails to notify them once you launch you can create your own landing page on your website, or you can create an upcoming page inside Product hunt by Ship there is available one upcoming page with limited features, and you can upgrade for more features.
  • we create our upcoming page once we decide to launch to introduce our product for PH Community and collect feedback and beta users before launch internally not our own because of most of PH Ppl familiar with PH upcoming pages.  Check out dashi upcoming page

• Decide launching date: as we agreed there is no best time or day for launching but as our observation and all common recommendations if you’re seeking for  a lot of traffic, engagement  and upvotes you should launch between Monday and Thursday but also there is a big competition in those days because most of the big companies launch product during weekdays, you can launch weekends and get high rank but with low upvotes and engagement, and another factor:  this depends on your community and users active days and locations. “so this is your choice”
  • When we launch Premast plus we decide to avoid weekends and launch on Monday 10^th of August 2020 and we decide this too with dashi on the 7^th of September 2020.

• Supporters: create a list of all potential supporters such as (Team, Friends, professionals, influencers, tech groups, Communities interested in your field and PH) collect all this in one sheet with any available data Twitter accounts – Facebook accounts, Groups – LinkedIn – Slack communities – etc…
  • We categorized all supporters in a sheet with URLs for easy accessibility, then we reached to them to introduce our product and get their feedback and announce about our launching date on PH and we let them have a look to our upcoming page inside PH,

Tip: not all your friends and communities familiar with PH so make good filtration or you can teach them.

Tip: don’t ask for upvotes directly. Or force anyone to engage to your product, “don’t spam people”

Tip: Avoid mass emails and mass messages this will not work with PH algorithms.

• Hunter kit: If you hunt your product by yourself or by hunter you should prepare some Visual & writing assets and requirement settings checklist needed for launching, that saves the hunter time and help him to launch easily
  • hunter kit includes:
    • URL: Direct link for your Product website.
    • Name of product: avoid indirect description or emojis just you clear product name.
    • Tagline: catchy a few words to describe your product briefly. in 60 Ch. max
    • Description: the long-detailed description with more information about your product in 260 Ch.
    • Topic: there is a PH list of Topics that help will categorize your product, so choose a few strongly related.
    • Download link: some extra links if your product runs on external stores.
    • thumbnail: is the main product squared image in 240*240 we recommend use GIF
    • Gallery: showcase your product in 5:8  images explain your product features well. The recommended size is 635×380.
    • Video YouTube URL: we recommend support your gallery by Video that well visualize your product and get good attention.
    • First comment: to motivate others to engage and discuss the values of your product you should break the ice and start the conversation by introducing yourself and your team briefly, explain your product features and values in 4:5 sentences, and ask them to try your product and give you feedback If your product Is premium we recommend giving any offer to encourage more people to try out your product, especially if you launch a new one. you can check the PH guide
• Creating content:
  • We prepared our media elements that we used it in Social media and other outreach activities in launching day  such as Content & Designs :
    • Social media launching post design
    • Social platforms cover photo.
    • Millstones posts design when you reach to (50 – 100 – 200 – …) upvotes.

• • • Announcement messages.
    • Newsletter email.
    • Upload your video on YouTube to use the link in launching. checkout our PH launching video
    • Announcement banner on your website for regular visitors

Tip: Make sure everything is done & ready enough time before launching.

—> Now we’re ready for launch <—

2- Launch Day:

• Posting: In the Morning we finalize the last touches of launching and we started to edit all settings of the product page 1 hour before launching and wait to launch time to click on the “Launch” button.
  • We launched “Premast plus” at 00:15 am PST and we are now in the “newest page” we try to be in the “Popular page” so we needed some activities to let algorithms work well.
• Maker Comment: Mo’men as a product maker added the first comment to make some engagement.

• Collect all teams in on the chat and make them updated.
• make an announcement on different social media platforms.
• Ask the PH community for feedback on your product on the discussion page.
• follow up with all comments & feedback and reply immediately.
• Send announcement launching Message & emails for beta users but not in one time try to divide the groups and remember to personalize your messages, “avoid mass emails”
• change all social media channels’ cover photos to the announcement theme.
• add upvote badge on your website.
• share you’re live now announcement to list of groups and communities that you prepared before.
• Share and tweet all day milestones. Check out our Twitter and connect

In Premast plus launching, we missed to schedule our activities and divided it during the day when we reached to 30  upvoted we moved from the Newest page to the Popular page, we acted to be in top products and we did a lot of our activities in the first part of the day

but we learned to improve this when we launched dashi to divide our activities during the day and balance between organic ranking and our external activities. To keep our product in top products this helped us well depend on the 20\80 theory.

all of us on the  team focused during the day to reply and engage with all comments and feedback and all product mentions on different platforms, “just be present”

After 24 hours of working, we did it again in the same ranking as the 5th product of the day, at this moment we took our breath.

but don’t release all your guards yet there some back effects and some feedbacks and comments after the launching day you should be ready for.

3- After launching

After launch day we:

• Thank all supporters, and follow up with any comments and requests.
• Shared announcement about our achievement on all social media platforms

• Sent newsletter for all our community.
• Collected all tested issues and recommendations for the technical team.
• Collected all new ideas and feedback to consider it in our plan
• Collected all data (email – SM) of people they reached out to us to convert them to subscribe in our newsletter and asked them to review your product, this is a good chance to build your community.
• Prepare & Publish your launching case study documentation article like this one.

More important we didn’t forget to celebrate <3

Celebrating the results and Numbers:

There are some KPIs we have put it before launching, so we analyzed our numbers to understand the effect of launching on Product Hunt and measure our growth rate, This is the perfect time to understand your growth techniques well, and vision our strategies to translate it to decisions & actions.

I’ll share with you our numbers:

Premast plus :
In 10^th of August, we reached to 2^nd place rank, but we end the launching day at 5^th place in top products and within the launching week we got:

• 405+ upvotes,
• 53 Comments
• 19 reviews
• 3k+  visits

• 1.7k+  plugin signups

dashi:

In 7^th of September, we reached 5th place and we kept in top products till the end of the day and
we got :

• 286+ upvotes,
• 57 Comments and
• 15 reviews
• 1.8k+ visits.

The above results are direct and instant but we gain a lot of other benefits too, We got mentioned in PH daily newsletter on both of the launching days.

And our brand was mentioned in some platforms, websites, newsletters, and review videos after our 2 launches.
Such as Siècle Digital is an online platform that sharing daily news, guides, and analyzes on digital topics, and WWwhatsnew.com on this site various web applications, technology news and tips for those who work in online marketing are discussed every day, and TekCrispy, this platform to help users understand and explore the technological world, scientific advances and trends in digital culture efficiently.

I’m really excited to do this again and get featured again and maybe with time, we will share with you other success stories related to Product Hunt. We all have access to it, with presence, and commitment we can achieve goals, develop technologies and grow our businesses. Meet you at our next journey 😉