I got 800 software users in 7 days (with Product Hunt)

My new product recently launched on Product Hunt and in this video I'm going to explain what Product Hunt is, the results of us launching on the Product Hunt platform and if we were to do it again the exact SOP that we're going to follow in order to get more exposure and hopefully win product of the month. I will also be adding the SOP in the first link in the description at Google Doc if you do want to use it and learn from what we learned from launching on the platform. So for those of you that are new to Product Hunt, essentially Product Hunt is a platform where new software products will launch every single day. For example, you can see ChatGPT recently released their new browser on Product Hunt. And essentially you'll see there's hundreds of thousands of people that go to Product Hunt every single month and therefore get exposure to these new products where they can try them out, sometimes get access to discount codes, etc. and then if they like the product comment and upvote it and my new startup Lyra the final meeting platform recently released on product hunt in order to get some early beta users for a new version of our product and get people using our platform to gather feedback and essentially as you go through the day it starts at San Francisco time at one past midnight in the morning so it was a little bit of a late one we went to bed at like 5am you'll see throughout the day as people engage with your product, upvote it, comment on it, you get points. And if you finish, you know, top three of the day or week or month, you essentially get a social proof badge on your website, such as products of the week, products of the month, et cetera, et cetera. As you can see, we won some awards. And essentially the whole point of all of this is on product terms, you then get hopefully thousands of people to your website, hundreds of people to your product to ultimately gather feedback depending on the stage of your business make money or improve now the results of us launching on product hunt we actually got number three products of the week and number two of the day as well so it was a really good week and we learned a lot from it as you can see here we had really good progress throughout all of the day we got people like gary tan to support us and a vote which was amazing and you'll see that in terms of the week we finished third and for the month as of this screenshot we actually finished we're seventh right now and the result was we got 880 signups to our software which was great however there was a lot that we did wrong and there was a lot that I would do again I'm not advocating hacking product turns in order to get higher but obviously the higher you are on the leaderboard the more likely people are to see you and therefore the more likely you are to get signups good feedback and money from your product Hunt launch. So what I'm going to go through now is what I am going to do differently in our next launch, what we as a team learned from launching on Product Hunt, and then finally the SOP. So what I would do differently. The first thing is you want to be getting as many upvotes and comments from verified accounts. Now, if on the day of your launch, you just send out messages to everyone that you've ever known, and those people haven't used Product Hunt before, they sign up, they upvote your product. That upvote is not one point. So as I showed you earlier, essentially throughout the day, you have points and upvotes and comments will contribute to those points. However, an upvote from someone that creates the account on the day that you launch is not counted as high as if they were already on the platform, they'd verified their accounts, they'd engaged with launches before. So something that I would definitely recommend is get your team members, get your friends, get investors, users to verify their account ideally in order to make sure that you get higher up on the platform when you get upvotes to maximize your exposure. So ideally warm up that audience by, you know, letting them know you're launching on product and if they want to support you and they can verify their account and support you on launch day. Then this is a little bit like fits in with the whole 996 sort of theme of things around startups but nap in the middle of the day do not sleep when your product launches on product hunt and do not sleep at the end of the day which means that between like 2 and 1 a.m to like 4 a.m two days running you should not be sleeping the reason being is those are the most important times that's at the start of the day where you need to get as much traction as possible and obviously after that in order to stay as high as possible on the leaderboard and then obviously at the end of the day that's when it's you know close to crunch time close to when you can win your first awards etc to get that social proof so don't sleep at the start or the end of the day so you're actually awake and change your plan and do things based upon where you're ranking and then if you do send people to product hunt send them to the home page not your launch page basically if someone goes directly to your launch page i believe that that vote isn't counted as highly as opposed to if someone like went on the product search homepage saw your product and clicked on it and then upvoted so you want to be encouraging as much organic engagement as possible and a good example of this you can see that we actually got around 1.7 000 followers on the day these are products that were above us for the week and you can see we got more followers than these bottom three and the reason for that is iman gadzi one of our investors posted about us on twitter and Instagram. So we got a ton of traffic come to our page. However, because they went to the launch page, because they weren't verified accounts, and because they signed up on that day, even though we got really good feedback on Lyra and we got loads of users, it didn't really help us with the product launch because there were new users on product turns, they weren't verified, etc, etc. So I would definitely do this beforehand in order to get an engaged audience, not just do all the promotion on the day beforehand is really important and to give you an example of this you'll see that this spike on our launch this is actually when we sent an email to our email list to say hey if you supported us and upvoted us you can't specifically incentivize upvote so we just said you know if you have supported us please verify your account because this will help us you know hopefully win products of the day and you know get maximum exposure and you can see how much it shot up. I think that's maybe like somewhere between 20 and 40 points. So it had a really big input. So you definitely want to be pushing for verification before and during the launch. So now you know the things that we would do differently next time. I'm now going to walk through the SOP and just to emphasize, SOP is something that can maximize your exposure and product signups, not just from Product Hunt, but across many different channels. And just remember that while product hunt and winning products of the day is great you shouldn't necessarily be aiming for it because the only thing that matters when you launch on product turns in my opinion is quality feedback from early adopters product usage and then ultimately revenue if you're at that stage you know you can't actually incentivize upvotes so i don't want you to see that this is a hacky thing or working with an agency to pay them in order to get an upvote because at the end of the day like getting fake upvotes and getting at the top and getting social proof in my opinion means nothing if your product is actually crap and no one wants to use it so definitely worth remembering and as you can see i've broken it down into before launch launch day and then throughout the day as well as after launch and i just want to highlight a few things and as i said this full thing will be below but the main things that i would do is make sure you ask team members or guaranteed upvoters so people that you know who love the product like super users team members etc to create and verify their account before you launch because their upvotes will then count higher and therefore you'll be able to get higher up and before the day make sure you assign clear team roles you're gonna have to be managing support there's gonna be all the promotional stuff and there's also potentially going to be bugs and crashes you need to make sure that each team member has clear roles because otherwise the launch is going to end in disaster. Now actually on the day, the product hunt day starts at one past midnight PT. That's when your products will go live. Immediately after that, you want to make sure you do your final QA and make sure it's actually working. Before then at 10 past midnight, sending an email to all of the users, target customers, immediate network in order to check out your page. And obviously if you can offer them some sort of discount on the product hunt launch that's fantastic but remember you shouldn't be incentivizing upvotes at that time you can also whatsapp and linkedin dm your immediate network again sending them to the product hunt home page and then obviously continue the momentum all the way through to 6am which typically depending on where people are that's when the people are more likely to be awake so at that point you can reach out to your wider network personally asking them one-on-one in order to check out your launch so you can see there's a lot more to this but these are the things that had the greatest impact you can then also see at 9am if you have any influencers associated to your product for example we had iman gadzi you should get those people to share it at 9am in order to maximize reach and really try and get your products ahead at the top of the leaderboard to maximize exposure then what i recommend you do at 3pm similar to how we did when we got that jump is remind people to verify their accounts so anyone that signed up to your product in the day that's where you can send an email to those people to say hey thanks for supporting us thanks for finding us on product hunt if you loved our product would appreciate if you you know upvoted us and dropped a comment you know as i said you can't incentivize it but obviously if you ask people to verify their account and upvote you that's going to give you that final last push in the closing half of the day. Now, throughout the day, you definitely want to make sure you're replying to all the comments as they land. I don't know this for sure, but I do think that replying to comments helps you. And ideally, if you do that sooner rather than later, that's also a good thing. It shows Product Hunt as well that you're engaging with the community, etc. You can also post a forum post on your actual launch page. So you can see here that I've said you can post on the product hunt forum to remind people to verify their accounts. I did that. And as you can see, asking people to verify did have sort of a big input. And maybe if we'd done that sooner, we could have caught up to the person ahead of us. Now, after you've launched, I really do then recommend you in order to do a retrospective, because at the end of the day, like none of this matters if you don't learn how to improve your startup, your products, delight customers, and learn how to generate more revenue after it. So you can ask these questions. again this is all in the sop this is what we went through and then obviously follow up with the audience to ask them for feedback we actually offered one-on-one onboarding calls that everyone that signed up to our product during product hunt but then even still now so that i can help them get started with the product but then also get their feedback to learn how to improve so just remember that product hunt is just a distribution channel without a great product people won't love and come back to you to ultimately pay so there you are everyone that is a walkthrough of our product hunt launch what we do differently and our sop if you found this helpful please subscribe to our youtube channel as a document and the learnings from grown lira as a lead up product like growth and yeah feel free to check out the sop below and i'll see you in the next video

I launched on Product Hunt 🚀

Here's the exact process we followed, and what I'd do differently if I did it again.

Product Hunt Launch SOP: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x0rt2WTcwU9G_xTbT9uFdUiw2Bz8tozkrENHBKNi31U/edit?usp=sharing 

To learn more about Lyra, click here: https://lyra.so/

Timestamps:
00:00 Product Hunt
1:52 Launch results
2:53 Learnings
6:30 Launch SOP
9:52 Launch Day