3 Hacks to Boost your Product Hunt Launch
I’ve hunted more than 10 products on Product Hunt this year so far. I often help B2B startups to launch on the platform because they a lack experience in best practices.
Here are 3 hacks that will help you succeed on the launch day:
Promote your Product Hunt launch on LinkedIn
LinkedIn wisdom usually recommends avoiding posting twice on the same day. The LinkedIn algorithm tends to lower the reach of your first post if you post a second time within the same day.
During my last 16th product hunt launches, I experimented with single posts vs. double posts format. The average reach of single posts is indeed higher:
However, if I compare the total view during the day (by summing the view of each double post): the double post format is overperforming by far:
Posting twice within the day is getting 30% more views than posting only once.
Moreover, posting twice in the day allows you to play across time zones. With the dual post format, I will post the first time at 9:01 AM (Prague) right after the launch. It is the perfect time for my European contacts and helps me get initial traction on Product Hunt.
I will then make a second post around 3 PM (Prague time) which corresponds to the morning on the US east coast.
I also found out that sharing a screenshot of the launch dashboard works well for the 2nd post of the day, as shown below:
Ask a question on the day of the launch
Product hunt changed its notification system recently. The followers of a hunter won’t get email notification when the hunter launch a new product. This is part of the push of Product hunt to encourage makers to hunt their own products. However, followers will still get an in-app notification on Product Hunt:
There is still one way to send an email notification to your product hunt followers: ask a question. When you ask a question, most of your followers will receive an email notification about it.
So on every launch, I ask a question related to the product I’m hunting and include a post-scriptum at the end mentioning that I’m hunting a product today.
Here is an example of my post when hunting Crawlee:
I like to include surveys in the questions I’m asking, but this hack will work well even without a survey.
I also usually reuse the same question to create a post on Indie-hacker and leverage my follower base there.
With this hack, I advise you to put the time into thinking about your question. I often see questions like “We are launching today!”.
I find this type of question spammy, so I recommend avoiding them.
Connect with other Product Hunt users before launching
Being connected to a few people who are active on Product Hunt before your launch is a good idea.
There are 2 easy ways to find a list of people active on Product hunt:
- Check out upvotebell for the topic related to your product
- Extract a list of people who upvoted similar products to your product.
Phantombuster has automation to extract the last 18 upvoters of any product. It is possible to get the full list of Product Hunt upvoter by using their official API. If you need help with that, do not hesitate to get in touch with Tetriz.
From my experience, Twitter and Linkedin are the best channels to get in touch with Product hunt influencers. Getting in touch with relevant influencers requires 1 to 2 weeks, so do not do it at the last minute.
PS: If you need help with a Product hunt launch, check out my action plan template.
Originally published at https://www.tetriz.io on September 5, 2022.