Product Hunt is a community of makers, early adopters, techies, and just passionate product lovers who want to try cool new stuff. Why does this matter? 

Because you need users. You need feedback. You need customers. 

Producthunt is a 100% free way to drive hundreds (or even thousands) of new users to your site. 

Need evidence? Here are the users that have visited Modash from Producthunt. I think you can easily identify launch day:

What kind of products is ProductHunt great for?

The tools that do best on ProductHunt typically fall into some of these categories: 

• Freemium or Free to try.

• Geared towards professionals like developers, designers, founders, marketers etc. 

• B2C software like meditation apps, podcasts, social networks

• High-end consumer hardware like smart locks, luxury desks or even whole apartments.

• Really well-made content or directors. Like (really good) E-books or Startup Stash, a directory of startup tools. 

Here are some of the top products from recent days, to give you an idea of what’s working on producthunt.

 

How to prepare for a (really successful) ProductHunt launch in just 3 weeks.

A lot of great companies recommend planning and prepping for your launch well in advance. 

I’m more of the let’s get this shit done with 70% perfection this week, rather than wait 2 months to get to 80% perfection.

At the end of the day, if your product is great, it should do great. 

By the way. Do not ask for upvotes. Ever.

Week one. The basics:

Get yourself and your entire team to warm up your Product Hunt accounts. That means signing up, upvoting and giving genuine feedback on 2 or 3 products per day, 2 or 3 days per week. If you and your team upvote your product on launch day with brand new accounts, Producthunt will punish you.

In week one you should also prepare the basic materials you’re going to need for your launch. 

1. The name of your product. Hopefully, you know this.
2. Correct URL. Also your App-Store URLs if relevant.
3. Tagline (under 60 characters). Read other top products for inspiration.
4. A short description (max 260 characters) This should be fun (yes, emojis) and informative.
5. Screenshots, gifs and/or youtube demo of your product.
6. A square avatar Gif for your product. (Samples below)

7. A personal, brief intro message with substantial info on why you build it, what you’re looking for etc.

You will use this as your first comment when the post goes live. This is what ours looked like when we launched Modash for finding influencers:  

 

Week two:

I know, week one was a lot. But once all of that is done, you can focus on building the hype. 

While you and your team continue to provide valuable, honest and frequent feedback and interactions to the Producthunt community, keep an eye out for a hunter. 

Hunters are the ones that publish you on the site. If they have a lot of followers, it can significantly impact your launch.

Our hunter Bram Kienstein is one of the most followed hunters on the platform and launched Startupstash, a directory of startup tools. It was the most upvoted product of all time. How did I reach Bram? 

By giving honest, genuine feedback on his project NocodeMVP project.

Believe it or not, I didn’t think this would be what fostered our relationship. I expected to harass hunters endlessly and this was just an honest and spontaneous Tweet, but it let to Bram hunting Modash. 

You can identify hunters by being active in the Producthunt community. There is also a directory here: https://500hunters.com/ 

This might take you some time, but if you spend 10-30 minutes interacting with a few hunters who are suitable to hunt your product every day one of them will be willing to support your project (or worst case, will tell you why not). 

Alongside finding a hunter, you’re going to want to tell everyone you know when you’re launching and how they can help. 

This includes existing users, social media followers, your mom, fellow maker friends, etc.

Launch week:

You should test your NUX (New user experience) pretty thoroughly in this week. Is it easy to sign up? Will it work if 500 people need to verify their emails to sign up? Is my site trustworthy with an SSL certificate? 

From there, customize the experience a little. We made sure all users referred from producthunt saw a different homepage that included a “Welcome Product hunters” along with some cheeky Producthunt shoutouts along the signup process. 

When to post? 

Here’s what product hunt themselves have said on the topic: 

“There is no single best time, but there are considerations to keep in mind. The homepage is based on a 24 hour cycle, new products hit the homepage at 12:01am PST and are added throughout the day. We tend to stop featuring new products for the day around 11am PST — if something posted after that time gets featured, we’ll bump it to the next day to ensure it doesn’t get buried. There is no “magic” time to post, but it’s best practice to do it before 9am PT so there’s enough time in the day for people to discover and discuss your latest creation.”

I agree, except I believe you should post at 00:01 on the day of your launch. 

You have 24 hours to really shine on product hunt and all the attention you get in that 24 hour window will matter most. 

Avoid weekends, weekends (Fri-Sat-Sun) launches always seem to get less attention. 

The 24 hour sprint: 

On launch day, you’re working a 24 hour shift. 

Make sure you’ve scheduled social media posts on all of your personal and company profiles pointing people to product hunt and asking for feedback. Do not ask for upvotes.

You and the team will engage and interact with every single product-hunter. Every comment must get a response and keep the conversation going. 

We launched a whole new feature we had been working on in the middle of the day because so many comments requested that exact feature. It was half done, but we pushed it out and made it happen. 

A few ideas on how to go above and beyond: 

• Tweet to every single upvoter with a thank you, and ask their opinion.
• Offer additional freebie, extended trial period etc for product hunt users.
• Send follow up messages to all upvoters once you have a few major new features. 

There you have it. The simple to-do list that got us hundreds of users with our Product hunt launch. You can contact me anytime you need support launching your product, with influencer marketing strategy (like influencer contracts) or in the case you need a Canadian to do… Canadian stuff.

– Avery – Ceo at Modash.io