How We Pulled Off a Successful Launch on Product Hunt
Similar to Google or Facebook’s algorithm, Product Hunt’s algorithm is also guarded and not completely understood by users. There are many articles out there that offer conflicting advice and opinions about how best to launch a product on the new product curation website.
Earlier this month, I led my company’s Product Hunt launch to a decent degree of success and I’d like to share with you my experience: what we did and the results we got. Whether you’re getting ready to launch a new product, or just interested in learning more, I hope my experience can be helpful.
JotForm 4.0, the 1st full-featured online form builder to go 100% mobile-friendly, finished our first Product Hunt launch in the top 5, at #2 with 520 upvotes.
Product Hunt 101
Let’s start by discussing what Product Hunt is and what it can do to help your company. Product Hunt is a website that lets users share and discover new technology products like software, apps, and websites. Products are posted, or “hunted” by “hunters,” and users can upvote and comment on products. Users are not automatically granted commenting rights upon signup, but instead need to be bestowed the privilege by a moderator. Some of my team, including myself, were given the ability to comment after emailing Product’s Hunt’s support team to request access.
Product Hunt has a very engaged audience, full of innovators and early adopters that can help your new product gain traction. Many tech journalists browse Product Hunt to get a pulse of new trending products, so a strong launch on Product Hunt gives your company a chance at PR opportunities.
Your Product Hunt experience may vary, but I found that while Product Hunt was great for gaining traffic and increasing brand awareness, it didn’t immediately do much for new user acquisition. However, it was absolutely a worthwhile experience that delivered a high ROI for traffic, seeing as it is free exposure.
You can only launch once.
A product can only be posted once on Product Hunt. This means that if someone posts your product before the day that you were planning on getting hunted, you have to catch it quickly if you want it taken down. Launching on Product Hunt is a one-time and single day opportunity to increase brand awareness, showcase your product to thousands of potential new users, and get traffic to your website and new product.
You should be monitoring the site to see if it is there in the days or weeks prior to your launch day, and acting quickly if you catch it. Because the “prominence” of the hunter makes a huge difference in the algorithm, the post can be difficult to find if it was posted by someone who isn’t a top hunter. This actually happened to us: we noticed that we got a tiny bit of traffic (3 people) coming from Product Hunt the day before we were set to launch on Product Hunt.
I found the hunter’s contact information and reached out to him immediately. Luckily, he was extremely understanding and reached out to Product Hunt’s support team on our behalf and requested that they remove his post because he was unable to remove it himself. If we were unable to catch the post before the end of the day, then there’s nothing we could do, and we would not be able to re-post with the top hunter that we had in mind. Needless to say, we got lucky.
So what can you do if this happens to you? If you discover that your product was hunter prior to your scheduled launch day, you can either reach out to Product Hunt’s support team to request to have the post taken down, or you can roll with it and promote the post the best you can despite being unprepared.
Secure a “top hunter.”
The person that posts the product is called a “hunter,” and the Product Hunt algorithm strongly favors hunts by “top hunters” to the point where when they post, it appears right on the homepage. They can only do this once per day, so you should reach out to a top hunter in advance to secure their daily slot. For better or for worse, if your product is not hunted by someone with homepage posting privileges, it will typically barely reach anyone. In fact, when our organic hunter (who didn’t have “top hunter” status) posted our product JotForm 4.0, it garnered a measly 3 upvotes over the span of 4 or so hours. The same product posted by a top hunter had a drastically more positive response.
Why would people spend so much time and effort trying to maintain their top hunter status? They’re out there building out calendars of products to post, creating online forms to gather product requests, and spending lots of time on Product Hunt. When I started researching Product Hunt in preparation for JotForm’s launch, I also asked myself this question: what is the point?
Turns out there are a few things to consider. One, Product Hunt is a fun way to discover and discuss products, and it can be a compelling game to be one of the few who hunt lots of popular products. Being a top hunter can be great for networking, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area tech industry. People from companies big and small reach out to top hunters, and build connections.
It’s can be helpful in your day job, and help you build partnerships and build co-marketing relationships. It’s a win-win to organize someone to hunt your product: you benefit from their enhanced visibility (in addition to then post automatically showing up on the homepage, all of their followers will get a notification that they posted your product), and they get to have a new product to post.
Reach out to a top hunter (here’s a continuously updated list of the top 500 hunters) through email. About 2 weeks prior to our launch day, I emailed Kevin William David, Product Hunt’s #1 hunter. He’s a Product Hunt enthusiast and a pro at what he does. Here’s what my pitch looked like:
Prepare all launch materials in advance.
Once we secured our hunter, we set out to get all of our materials ready in preparation for the launch. Often, startups and projects will use Product Hunt as their launchpad. But for JotForm 4.0, Product Hunt was just a small piece in our overall product launch plan so we already had materials ready that we could also use for Product Hunt, including screenshots, images, and videos. We had our product name and tagline ready, and just needed some icing on the cake.
You can use a static image or a gif to represent your product, and we chose a gif to help JotForm 4.0 stand out. One of our designers, Ecem, made a fun, animated icon.
We officially launched JotForm 4.0 on February 1st, and emailed our users about it. The next day, we launched on Product Hunt. Since our users are our biggest supporters, we emailed them a short note about it.
We avoided directly asking for upvotes throughout our Product Hunt launch because it’s against the rules and we didn’t want to be penalized. You’re in the clear if you use language like “support us” or “please give us feedback.”
JotForm’s CEO and founder, Aytekin Tank, wrote up a CEO comment to welcome the Product Hunt community and give a quick overview about JotForm 4.0.
Mobilize your team and network.
No one on the Marketing team, including myself, had launched on Product Hunt before. Because there was no precedent, we did a lot of research and were creative about building our army of supporters. We joined Slack groups filled with people that understood what we were trying to accomplish: product groups, product marketing groups, growth groups.
The members of these groups were product-minded, and more than happy to check out JotForm 4.0 and support our Product Hunt launch when the time came around. I would recommend joining relevant Slack groups in your field, as I was able to give and receive feedback from other people in the industry that I found interesting and helpful to what I was trying to accomplish at work.
Not only did I reach out to people in relevant Slack groups, but I also publicized our Product Hunt launch using my own social media profiles. I posted in Facebook’s groups of organizations that I was part of, and reached out to friends in tech who may be Product Hunt users.
There is a rumor that Product Hunt’s algorithm hurts your product if you link directly to it. Luckily, it’s a myth and Product Hunt’s COO disproves it here. So, send people directly to your post and don’t make them search for it.
For a year and a half, JotForm’s engineers and designers have been pouring their sweat and talent into building a completely new version of our product- and everyone’s excitement about the launch was a tremendous help to the marketing team. All of JotForm came together to help with our Product Hunt launch as well as other launch and pre-launch projects that we were working on.
About a month prior to our Product Hunt launch I asked everyone at JotForm to create a Product Hunt account and to engage with the platform, as it’s been suggested that the algorithm places less value on brand new accounts. When our post was live, I sent out an update email to JotForm employees.
Our hunter Kevin, the JotForm team, JotForm users, and people who support us (friends, family, network) helped get a nice buzz going on on Product Hunt in addition to the warm response from the Product Hunt community.
The results!
We ended the day at #2. Since we ended launch day at Product Hunt’s Top 5, we got featured in Product’s Hunt’s email newsletter: the Daily Digest.
I was disappointed that we weren’t number 1, but that’s just my competitiveness talking. I’m very happy with our overall JotForm 4.0 campaign and how our users are responding to the upgrade and the new features that are now available for them.
Note that the product that finished at #4 actually had more upvotes than the #3 product: this is because the algorithm is based on more than simply the number of upvotes.
When JotForm 4.0 was organically hunted on Feb. 1, we got 15 referrals over the few hours that the post was up. When we were hunted by Kevin on Feb. 2, we got 2,068 referrals and quickly became a trending product. We got a ton of free traffic, which definitely hit its peak on Feb. 2, but traffic has still not completely died 3 weeks later: around 19 people a day trickle through to JotForm from Product Hunt. We only got 16 signups that can be directly attributed to Product Hunt, which I thought was on the low side.
What I would do differently.
In hindsight, I have to admit that I would make sure that we’d be #1. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
But in all seriousness, this launch has been a fun learning process, and I’m happy to have been part of the launch of such an incredible product that makes life at work easier. Shoutout to our dev and design teams who made it happen!
