Launching on Product Hunt? 🚀 Tips & Tricks from an Experienced Product Hunter

hello everyone and welcome to our new chapter of hustle and grow meetups where we will be talking with um professional marketers from all over the world one is for today actually yule is located in portugal right yaroslav is in um yaroslav sorry where are you currently i'm in serbia in serbia right i spent four years in estonia Okay. So people are located pretty much everywhere, but we all care about one important topic today, how to actually get a successful launch on Product Hunt. I think a lot of people care about this topic, right? From founders, communities. I see it every other day, someone asks to support their product, right? Posting somewhere in chats saying like, guys please support me i'm launching today and every time it it makes me thinking is it enough to actually just have a lot of friends and to be a member of like a ton of chats where you just say please support me and then it will work or maybe this is not enough right and there are more tips and tricks behind that so that is why we're lucky to have yaroslav today who has um launched a lot of products on product hand and sideline is not the first one obviously so that is why we will be talking about this uh problem today a problem topic right and julia will support us with them uh more import information about sideline so that we understand what this product is actually about um a little bit more context that than just google analytics for ai agents which already sounds interesting okay before we jump to our agenda uh i just wanted to um to present our partner to mention one good product that our friends um make in terms of helping teams um organize their project management stuff and um help with task tracking but also organizing docs and knowledge base and actually much more so wise is a good old you know tool that might help you with them um getting started with a small team of under 10 people you get a free access it's like free forever uh with the with a small team so when you're under 10 you can give it a try and um i registered in the project and actually was quite impressed with how simple it is how really little stuff they have um at the moment i mean just very important just the s just what you need just like trello in good old days yeah so it replaces jira and conflict plus confluence asana plus notion click up monday a lot of expensive tools and um if you are curious you can give it a try and just uh use the qr code um the guys provide for us to have a three months free access for our today's meetup attendees and with that with that said um i just want to highlight our agenda once again so we've got an a brief intro with julia who will walk us through the background and the context before the ph launch and maybe you will introduce herself once again a little bit for us to give them uh context of uh what your background is actually about because i know something already of course and maybe people have already met you there right the ones who are in our community and visited our previous meetups uh but yeah that will be interesting to learn a bit more of how you could help startups who are just getting started and trying to figure out their marketing strategy and then we will pass the floor to yaroslav we'll uh get walk us through all the questions that uh founders should actually think about right before they get started with actually opening product hunt and going through all the fields and stuff you need to fill in uh we'll obviously uh finish with q a session where you will be able to ask your questions and um yaroslav will i think be able to cover maybe some some products a little bit more into details if you already have something behind your belt to actually launch maybe before i pass it to julia i will ask our meetup participants our attendees today if anyone has already had any experience with launching their products maybe someone wants to just share a little bit of context behind their products if you're okay with sharing some things okay people might still be um of course not able to talk and um that's fine so maybe if you have questions um along them meet up feel free to share in messages and with that said i will be passing the floor to julia then who will yeah give us more context julia please hey guys um so yeah i'm julia I'm a B2B SaaS marketer. I've been doing this for quite a while already. I've got my day job heading a team, a marketing team for a company that makes hardware and software. But I also have sometimes, from time to time, I have side hustles. And usually, it's about helping startups just because I once also tried to become a founder. I failed, but I still cherish the stream that maybe someday I will also launch something. That's why I prefer to keep close to the community and communicate a lot with startup founders and usually like word of mouth and LinkedIn bring me some teams that connect with me and sometimes we collaborate. So this is how it happened with Sideline. So I've been advising them on the marketing subjects, different kind of things. So we worked on ideal customer profiling with them on positioning and my job. Actually, I joined this startup maybe six months ago, and it's a very really part time for me but i was really um like i really liked the product i really liked the area and the category that it emerged in um i think if i just mentioned that there was a kind of a boom of um ior and geo tools in the market last year um i don't know if you noticed this but uh everybody wanted to to kind of crack how ChatGPT features different products. And a lot of- Yeah, and everybody kept saying traditional SEO doesn't work anymore. Don't even invest in this. Everybody was saying this, but SEO experts were saying, you just need to do the normal SEO and you will get your product featured by ChatGPT. So the truth is somewhere in the middle as always. But anyway, so there were a lot of people who just started to wipe code solutions that allowed you to retrieve the prompts and prompt results from different AI platforms and show you how your product is featured for key product prompts like best XYZ tool for small businesses. And basically, Sideline actually started with another brand name and another purpose. it was GPT rents. And the guys came up with this idea, I think, eight months ago, and they just wipe coded a tool that allowed you to see how your rent is featured on ChatGPT. But then there was a lot of hype around this topic in the valley even, and there started like quite a lot of companies to emerge and even big players like if you know seo like hrefs and samrush and all those big moments of seo started also to to create the same kind of functionality within their platforms and so it looked like already a red ocean because everybody was doing the same thing and the guys of course saw this and they also it's a very small team it's actually one full-time founder and a lot of part-timers like myself so it's a team of one basically so if you are a one-man show it's the same situation for our founder his His name is David, and he is also the kind of the founder who doesn't like ventures. I mean, he doesn't like to take money. That's why he always wanted to do to bootstrap or just to like not to raise a lot of funds. But in the situation where this product category that was emerging at that moment, it was actually crucial to move really fast. That's why players like Profound, Crunch, and some others, they quickly raised funding and started to accelerate quite a lot in their development. And David decided that he doesn't want just to compete with all those companies. By the way, Profound, which is the most well-known company in this field, has raised around C recently. I think it was a couple of weeks ago. So they already have a billion-dollar valuation. It's a bubble, of course, everybody understands this. But anyway, it was a very fast way to see around. So I'm just giving you the context to show what kind of situation our founder found himself. And so imagine like the Red Ocean, a lot of companies doing the same thing. Some of them already see funding level. And when we started to collaborate, the first question was, how do you differ from this crowd of same kind of apps, vibe coded apps? And this question was kind of tricky. And I think it's always tricky for every founder. But you really have to know the answer, because if you don't know the answer, then it doesn't make sense to move forward. And I started to challenge David all the time with this type of questions, because I knew that the future always depended on the answer. And eventually, he started to think about a pivot. So, he wanted to specialize the product to make it maybe sort of a narrower niche of audience, but go deeper for some type of clients rather than go broad like all the rest of the apps. And so what they decided to do is actually to focus not on the prompt side of things because there is still a lot of probability just because on ChatGPT or Perplexity, you don't have the common index with the rankings, like on Google, where brands fight for different positionings on the search result page. There is no such index for AI platforms. It's only the probability which will say, okay, for this prompt, in like six cases of 10, your brand will show up. But this is just a simulation. It's just an assumption. And this is kind of tricky also, not a very data-driven approach, because you have to build all your strategy on assumptions. And since David has a data analytics background, he wanted to have a different approach, to do something that will actually help marketers and founders to have a measurement tool that will be data driven rather than assumptions driven and they started to look into the first like zero step before all ai visibility actually happens and the zero step is actually for your website to get to chat gpt it has to be crawled by ai bot or ai agent or anything like google google also crawls the website that's why we have the site map we have some seo optimization and so then googlebot crawls your website it gets into the very very simple speaking but that's how it gets to to the ranking same happens with ai but they don't have only one uh crawler they have a lot of a lot of different bots and agents and these bots and agents what what they do they have different missions some of them they uh visit your website just to train some of them visit your website to do some indexing others are triggered by direct human query for instance chat gpt user bot it has this name user bot and it actually visits a website triggered by a request in the chat and so it's a bit more sophisticated than uh traditional seo and so the idea of david was actually to start tracking those different types of bots and to understand what kind of pages they visit, if they actually visit your website and there are no technical issues preventing them from visiting it, then what kind of pages they visit and retrieve. And this is already something a bit more data-driven because if you see that your website is not visited by bots, then it's a very simple, like, low-hanging fruit. You just have to find this technical issue, solve it, and let them in. And then most probably you will already start getting some traction in AI visibility. And so, yeah, that's how this idea of the pivot was born. We decided to focus on this part of the whole AI visibility thing. And to research how AI bots and agents crawl websites. and just to highlight this differentiation and just because we don't only track chat gpt we also rebranded to sideline i helped with that and came up with a different positioning angle on the icp or ideal customer profile for this product you you might say okay maybe it's seo guys but actually not because seo industry is is a bit uh conservative so all of them still see io geo thing as a kind of a they don't believe in it so they're still skeptical and like no thank you i'll take care of things by myself yeah yeah sometimes they also said that actually bots take the information from google and then feature it on chat gpt that's why if you are on google you will get to chat gpt it's a lie because i see that our product on my day job product it has already it's it's 10 years old it already has quite a lot of brand authority and good organic reach and no for the queries that it's supposed to show up on chat gpt it doesn't even though it has really nice positions on google so even just comparing like this without really big data i can say that the results don't match our results on google and chat gpt don't match this is all this yeah yeah thank you very much then um well i'm just looking at this screen is it the home page right the analytics what i'm sharing at the moment you are showing the qr code oh is it okay so it's so qr code right because i don't share what i'm what i'm looking at on my web pages but yeah i love the interactive uh style um you know of the main page analytics i guess what the product opens up with and the numbers keep growing all the time right like ai agent visits. 7,000 at the moment. Human visits from AI, 2,000. And it keeps growing all the time. So it puts some pressure on you, like, go install it at this very moment because you're missing them. If you know the platform, which is Cloudflare, it's one of the biggest CDNs that actually supports a lot of websites. I mean, a lot of websites use Cloudflare. so it reports that around 30 percent of traffic is already bots and agents and it's growing so you know if we can jump down to the point when you decided to launch on product hunt was it like a spontaneous decision or the founder felt like you are ready at this moment well actually we were aware that our ideal customer profile is not on product hunt this is something you have to always answer before you plan this. Is our target there or not? If it's not, why would you want to launch? So these sort of questions that are important. But I think Yaroslav will mention this in his part. For us, I would say that there were two main reasons. One, because our founder wanted it. And the second one, we wanted to get some response from the market to see if what we want to like if what we are building makes sense because still uh even though product people from product hunt won't be our ideal customer but they understand the tech and actually uh it was also it made sense to to test our positioning there um and yeah no goal number three is actually maybe also to get some organic push from from the platform and referrals from the platform because we are a website and we wanted to get some some traction for for the website so these were like three main goals that we had and then we started seeing how to do this and since nobody had experience um i i i haven't launched products on front of hand earlier so i of course i potentially i knew the steps because there are a lot of checklists and guidelines and a lot of material out there but what i knew really well is that it you'd better find an expert who has done this a lot of times before and who knows all the bottlenecks and all the tricky parts of this exercise. Just because we decided to invest our time into this, we wanted it to be a success. That's why when this topic popped up in our conversations with the founder, I remembered that I saw Yaroslav on a podcast with a friend of mine, and they were discussing their launch on Product Hunt. And by the way, it was also a success. I thought I should go to and ask this guy for help because it's the best thing to do when you don't know anything about the platform you're launching on. When you want to do it right from the first time. Yeah. Because otherwise it just, it wasn't worth the investment because even like creating all the visuals and descriptions, all that kind of stuff, it still requires quite a lot of input and we didn't want this to just to vanish in vain. And yeah, that's how we came to Yaroslav. Okay, so I think that's enough of an introduction, right, for our listeners, viewers to understand the context. And, right, Yaroslav, then pass on the floor to you to go into more details. How did it actually get to number one? Was it only about Sightline or about Yaroslav's experience, right? Okay, sorry. Give me, please, just a second. I'll try to share my screen. Well, since I'll need your assist. Just a second. Shall I stop sharing my screen? Okay, I did. I'm just a bit worried that I don't want to reopen Zoom because some other settings applied. So if I share my presentation with you, just drop the link, can you open it and I'll give some asks about something like a next slide, please. Will that be OK? Yeah, sure. OK, then give me one second to get ready. maybe some new participants who have just joined us meet up attendees want to say something if they have some questions about sideline before yaroslav get started you're welcome to share any questions concerns ideas maybe your take on current state of seo things okay so that's the pro the presentation i'm ready with it how to go maybe i could go some um like a full screen with this presentation just not sure how to go full screen um the button is a slideshow do you have it um yeah okay right so now the question i see that you're talking about the features but what are the benefits the benefit is to get your product to chat gpt and then if you get your product featured by chat gpt you get referral traffic and then that's a kind of a perfect question that's a kind of a benefit that's a kind of a perfect question because uh i've tailored my presentation and uh it's motor is taking two steps back i don't want to waste the time of everybody who are now at the meetup or all the future viewers of this meetup at youtube with all these uh simple you know following the guidelines like you need to fill this field you need to prepare five pictures and so on it's really boring so i want to take two steps back and to talk about something like positioning messaging tone of voice and some really good really great product marketing things besides all these filling in the fields in the correct order for another product launch. So can you please, how to say, click to the next slide? Okay, yeah. Yeah, so this is me. My name is Yaroslav. I have got some deep expertise in product marketing. i work as a chief marketing officer in some high-risk software as a service niche before this i got some experience in different products across it as well and today i am here as an independent product hunter marketing consultant for product hunt thematics so close to the end of this month i'll celebrate my five years on product hunt with uh 40 launches so half of them was uh fully commercial half of them was were pro bono something like can you become our hunter yeah okay just drop me an invite link and many of my commercial launches actually secured the first top one product of the day and some of them also won some more pages in product of the week and product of the month and one what i want to discuss today is as i spoiled before how to take a couple of steps back and how to think about how should we speak and this how can give some great ideas about tailoring what should we speak uh in the day of the launch so um right now at the screen you can see the best definition of marketing i really ever heard that marketing is an art of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time and also in addition to this really great statement so i would like to add some essential marketing question um every marketer every i don't know solo developer or solar entrepreneur something like this imagine yourself so everyone must ask from your visitor or customers point of view and the essential question sounds like why should i care how does it work imagine you're an average visitor of another site or landing page whatever and of course every business goal is to earn money that's not a big secret but if you are a customer your goal is another and according to jobs to be done methodology uh your goal is to hire some products for making some job for you for example to solve some problem you already have and and that problem couldn't be solved somehow else and too many companies that's a reference of that question in the chat too many customers or too many companies sorry start their communication with a just direct presentation of all the solutions all the features they have got but this approach fails because in the modern era of internet in the modern era of it and so on with a supply really of a sitting demand nobody gives an f letter about how cool with your product if your messaging positioning and tone of voice doesn't really resonate with them so uh what point should we start from um the next slide please and marketer simon sinek in his book start with why talks about the importance of knowing why we are going to think of why are we going to create something instead of thinking what should we do so there is a framework on the slide that call that's calling golden circle or why how what and the idea is that if we talk about a really good based approach then we should start with the very in layer why and why is a question something like what are our values why have we started to do this so it represents our mission our faith beliefs besides any idea of money making and besides any idea of business must earn money and so on then we continue with the question how and this how layer represents our processes strategy and what makes our approach really unique among our hours among others and the last the most primitive layer is what and what represents our product or service so what do we offer and uh i hope ula is still here because Because you will have a chance to correct me if only on the next slide. If only I remembered point of view of sightline slightly incorrect. So as far as I remember it, the why idea of the sightline was something like the internet And today is not the same and we want to help everyone to be successful in this AEO, GEO era. And then the layer of how was that apart from SiteLine's competitors, they, I mean SiteLine team measure the full AI purchase funnel, all these bot visits and so on. So everything that was provided in the context part of our meetup. So it was slightly maybe offensive to compare Siteline to the competitors of Siteline because the approach of Siteline was completely another. So the full funnel and so on. And the most primitive layer, what question is, what is Siteline? line is growth analytics for the agentic web everything is easy here but the essential was the why question and okay uh this is the second framework i really value in my work i decided not to uh show some you know competitors of sideline it might be slightly incorrect of business ethics and so on but i decided also not to think what uh it niche should i take as an example so these are disney heroes and the framework shows uh so you can see the matrix of four quadrants and this framework is needed for positioning our marketing messaging so there are two accesses the first axis is a emotional approach in our messaging versus the rational approach in our messaging and the second one is messaging which focuses on some problems pains fears and so on and also in opposite messaging that focuses on benefits advantages gains and something like this so how do you think let's just take a little bit break from uh my marketing theory um what disney hero would you place on uh what letter recording oh sorry oh i think maybe uh answers in the chat or something like this can you repeat the question yeah but um the next slide was spoiler so this question is not oh sorry so okay okay uh i decided that i placed uh all the uh disney heroes uh in this way because for example uh yeah uh i apologize that um i'm not so the person who changed the slide but uh it happened accidentally i didn't want to do this sorry that doesn't doesn't matter because i was switching to messages yeah okay okay well uh so i decided that this order is uh correct because for example a piglet if we imagine that all the disney heroes you can see on your screen is something like it product in the same marketing niche so for example piglet he is constantly worries and gets scared and his motivation often stems from anxiety so he is extremely emotional and everything he talks about is all these problems pains risks and so on so he stands for this position compared to them the donkey i don't know the name in english original something like er no yeah that's the donkey okay Well, compared to Piglet, Zonkey is a classic pessimist. He's emotionally focused on some problems, some losses, but he's not so emotional as Piglet is. So, on this matrix, so er stands for more right position then if we take a look at the quadrants of emotional class benefits then i think that tiger will stand for the extremely emotional and extremely uh beneficial uh all this embodiment for enthusiasm energy uh joy possibilities and so on and um compared to winnie pooh winnie the pooh or vini is not so emotional so tiger is so that's why i think the same approach and if we take a look in rational quadrants then the all is a paragon of a wise person he is not emotional absolutely he is 100 percent rational and he talks about all this positiveness like benefits and so on and vice versa the rabbit is systems oriented controller but he constantly thinks about order and some problems risks and so on so that's why he stands in another quadrant and of course it was some joke to take a break from marketing theory But this framework is extremely useful if you start to think what approach in my messaging should I choose for my own products. That reflects with some words that Yuliya told in her path that she challenged the founder of Sightline every single time. something like what's the difference of your product among others because if only you will you will hear the answer that there is not no really difference um it's a kind of a red flag of a panic signal because um all the niches at all the markets are not really green nowadays too many new products have been launching day by day so you need some strong both messaging and positioning and value proposition for everything you want to deliver at the market so yourself sorry so what about sideline if you could help us to understand this frame better or will it be later where you can just you know give us an example let's proceed further please so messaging is what we exactly speak and the tone of voice is how we speak about that so the previous exercise was something for how we speak and right now on the on the screen uh you can see a direct examples of sightlines messaging so this growth analytics for the agentic web is so-called tagline so it was tailored to resonate the most and it belongs to messaging also this short description could be more white but the team decided and i agreed that it's pretty enough description i mean track how ai agents blah blah blah so it was really tailored and it resonate with the target audience really great and also these makers comments and of course some images in the carousel that helped us to storytell the idea um how can sightline be helpful for everyone who decided to dive deeper into details and to take a look at some launches information and one approach that we decided also to implement into sightline launch was a mascot Why do we have to decide to do this? Can you turn the page, please? Yep, thanks. Yeah, there is a quote that making things easier is hard, unfortunately, but making things harder is pretty easy. and the sideline itself it's a kind of complex maybe even complicated product because it creates a new niche and you need to tell people that there is a problem this problem already exists but you need to become something like you need to gain some experience some beginner education in the ongoing on creating niches so everything already blows a mind so we decided to um how to say ask for some help in hand and the next slide please there is a nice tone of voice technique that helps you to speak something you might don't want to speak yourself or maybe something that is not really appropriate to you according to your tone of voice or something like this and it's a mascot and some functions of the mascot including but of course not limited to is for example asking the questions that are on typical users minds representing the average user based on how well the company understands their fears desires motivation and so and so on etc etc etc and um the next slide please uh i'm 100 sure that a combination of complex software as a service plus mascot is a really good match because um mascot doesn't represent us i mean the company uh it's a representation of our user and partner and that makes pretty much sense so for example uh if we decide that yes our mascot is our average user then you can delegate this mascot for example to make conclusions uh so on the left part of the screen on this pretty little android that sidelines team created or for example it suggests that visits from ai apps have higher conversion something like this so it's a kind of additional motivation for the user to be more encouraged about knowing all the details also this kind of mascots can call to action like on the one of the really complex slide we had some discussion about so is it enough understandable for an average user or really not and also on this slide so suppose that some really big list of features benefits blah blah blah but putting a wall of text on the image is not really appropriate so we decided that the mascot should cause to ask other questions in launch comment section and actually it worked because uh how many comments have you received within the launch day it was around i think it's just the whole number with the replies because i think it comes yeah of course it should be divided by around 80 i think should be divided by two but anyway 40 comments why not and of course the same escorts can encourage you like oh let's get that driven but the last example will be the best one can you can you click on the slide please thanks uh when it was a place holder actually i put it there i wasn't sure it was supposed to be there but then i asked yaroslav and david so what should we write and they said why let it be so that's how it yeah so for example for sightline themselves is absolutely inappropriate to talk about their own niche like what the sorry what the fuck is this but so for average user what was your first idea when you just seen the screen i think it's the same that this pretty little android thinks about uh but using this uh technique with the implementing their mascots you can just help yourself to simplify all the messaging for really complexed software as a service how can i an agent it's a question not for me i think i can reply after um yeah maybe after yeah it will be a q a section so thanks for the question just not for me um can you click on the next slide please and uh starting to finish uh my speech um i told you about several frameworks approaches uh marketing techniques and so on uh average product hunter won't really tell you about and so in this uh something like a summary because so-called maker's first comment is in the same time it's a storytelling and it's a kind of a summary so here i highlighted some sections in david's words uh and these sections uh resonates with the previous topics i covered within this speech so why we build sideline is the question is the answer for this question why from the golden circle framework the problem is an answer of why should i care question our approach is definitely how and so the next slide please and some use cases criteria to knowing the customer really better and every good message ends with the hook and so the hook is still active if some of users oh sorry some of visitors uh some of our viewers of our meetup will watch it's on youtube is interested in trying sightline here is a promo code from product hunt launch i think it's still active but if only it is not active then please contact julia she will provide an actual one and the last slide please it's a code for me so if everybody if anybody is interested in getting some consulting some helping hands with a product hunt launch and so on and maybe i don't know if you want to follow me on instagram whatever here's one link to rule them mall so-called uh thanks for your time i hope my speech was of use to you so or yeah veronica thanks for your helping hands and the presentation can be shot thank you very much eroslav that was very detailed and i think we now have some like some kind of a checklist of what we should actually get into i already jotted down some thoughts in one block of notes like what to think about all this why how things i mean like you kind of have an answer for this but when you're actually approached and asked these questions from product hunt you're still like let me think i should frame it nicely so definitely something to think about um maybe guys you can share some kind of outcomes maybe that's a question for yulia if you know any data any metrics did it actually help to increase organic traffic uh this number one bad did it have any um yeah we got some signups uh so basically that that was the result we saw that some people registered for the product uh now we are just because our product has a free trial uh we are now trying to monetize those people who signed up to sign up already for a plan um just to be to to get realistic because sometimes i think when people look at product hunt and they think oh it's an international global startup platform i will get thousands of visits from it. Well, I recommend you to get real. You will not get thousands of visits and like, I don't know, a stream of money. And we were actually, we didn't hope that it will happen because I mentioned that it's not our target audience. But of course, we got organic push that we wanted, we got some really meaningful conversations in the comment section, we got some people noticing us, we got David got invited to a podcast right after that. He's eventually he got some investment. So we are on a very pre seed the level just because operations consume quite a lot of money. That's why he actually took some money from from a fund and that fund was really happy that we actually succeeded so it was a lot of different positive impact from the launch and we are now working on monetizing the signups that we got after the launch day but yeah you should be realistic about this because i actually registered for the product i signed up at this very day when you shared the results and like every so i also got curious and I think there might be some early adopters there who still haven't heard about the product and curious to give it a try but I actually had that question like what what TF is it when I was going through this you know login sign up wizard and it asked me how I want to integrate this product into my website I was like okay I should go find out what http requests uh yeah i guess so it was like a little bit tricky for me but yeah made me think how i could actually leverage this product so i think the there might be a good result from the kind of more brand awareness right uh wider brand awareness and also uh for investments potentially and maybe we will ask yaroslav if if he's got some analytics from all the products he already launched what are people's expectations why do they actually launch how do they explain this uh they press like pushed by investors any funds who say like we want to see if this is actually successful right if this actually needs what people need or people just want to do this without any reason just because this that's what they heard about or was the typical reason uh you know every time i answer that the reason why really we are going to product hunt is to get a market response and what will be the market response is so every single product so i mean uh own something like a journey a quest something like this so it really depends on what product on what time some of products are really outdated for nowadays but some of them are really high tight on hype you name it so the final result may really might be unpredictable for farmers right absolutely absolutely and you know a negative response is still a response you can save some big amount of money if you stop right now with the mvp and just something like failed product hunt launch but if instead of this you will continue to develop and develop and develop and then the losses of money will be much more significant than if you only decided to stop in the very beginning but so of course i can't really name some great numbers like revenue and so on because it's a secret of every single team i worked with but there is one good case i can reveal some details and this product is no more it was something like a newsletter about vacancies on prompt engineering and so on so the very first month of all this ai madness the goal of a founder who hired me for helping with a product hunt launch was something like at least 50 emails collected and with just maybe 200 of volts we uh grabbed 200 in the first several hours and got something like several thousands of visits on the uh site but it was really all this uh reaction of uh thematics on so big hype So that's why I started with it really depends for every product in different circumstances, different time terms and so on. The results and the whole story will be different. Yeah, thank you very much. Guys, can we answer the question from our messages? So, the one, how can an agent visiting a site increase the conversion rate? So, I think there are two thoughts. The first one is that people who come from ChatGPT and similar platforms convert better than those that come from other digital sources. This is already a fact. Why? because people ask they they have a chance to ask all the questions all the concerns that they have before purchase they kind of skip the whole customer journey by asking those questions and so they are very warmed up when they they finish this conversation and if your product gets featured as the best solution the probability of them converting on your website is much higher than for a person who just saw your banner on google that's the first idea to keep in mind okay then considering this if people from chat gpt convert better it means that we need to get our product mentioned for as many prompts as possible in our product category of course so that chat gpt mentions us and we get that warm traffic to our website and sideline helps your website to get featured on chat gpt and similar platforms by making sure that their crawlers and bots visit your website so we give a tool that actually shows you how ai discover your website how they analyze it with what kind of pages they visit so you can optimize the structure of the pages right optimize the content um work on the topics um like i don't know enrich your content better so um it has all the potential like answers to all the questions that the person might ask to chat gpt and so that's how we solve this problem making your website more discoverable for ai bots and crawlers we let more people see your products cited on chat gpt and similar platforms and you get warm traffic to your website which converts better yeah it's that's why it it's kind of complex product that's why yaroslav took this topic to explain this um so it was a challenge it was a challenge to come up with some simple wording for this yeah and that's funny somebody actually asked at the very beginning like this why question that yaroslav has been highlighting that like what's the point of this product you are guys talking about features i want to understand why i should use it yeah but guys i wasn't selling it to you i was telling you about the launch yeah because like when we're thinking like okay i have to explain about the product you are usually like and it can do this and this it's so cool yeah that's something is absolutely okay that's what we're thinking when we're not selling when it's not a sales call yeah okay maybe some other questions from the audience um or if there are no questions yet uh maybe i can ask one uh if i approach yaroslav with my product let's say what will be the questions yaroslav you will be asking or the state of the product you will be looking at like let's say some you know random founder random product and they say okay let's launch the project on product hunt i guess i'm absolutely ready you know what i don't even have an um you know a working product let's say just an mvp just an idea i already want to launch it just to see the response so what will be the kind of checklist how you usually screen people or just you know to explain when the product might not still be ready for it to not bring some illusions or uh you know uh there is um a page named streak on product hunt it's a number of consequent visits yeah so this list of champions who visit product hunt day by day and upload something so i am 26 among many hundreds of thousands of people who used to visit product hunt at least two days in a row yeah it's a kind of uh play stupid games win stupid prizes but it is what it is so i oppose at least one product daily to keep this trick concurrent and it turns my watchfulness really great uh so the this skill of watchfulness helps my not really intuition but something like a sharp eye that helps me to answer will i prefer to work with somebody or will i not prefer to work with somebody and to recommend someone just to not really to rely on product hunt launch because if the product won't get featured it's a kind of 80 debuff to all the efforts put in the preparing of the launch so for example um all the it products about you know something like tutoring um teaching languages online not the drawing model the lingua model is still okay but all this tutoring also all these vpns because there are too many vpns all these task trackers there are too many task trackers everybody is tired of task trackers uh something like this so uh yes so today's type of products you would advise not even give it try give it a try on product hunt right because there are just way too many right so i'm really afraid that all mentioned i mean just previously mentioned products so won't get featured okay maybe your goal is just to receive a search engine optimized link from product hunt if only you want uh spend a penny and then okay just fill in all the fields and get your link but if we talk about product hunt launch in its classic way like to get the market response and to hope for the best for the visits and for um every single step of the marketing funnel from visits up to registration activation and so on and finally revenue uh then of course so we should work with products uh that probably will get featured Yeah, and get public attention. Okay, so there are certain niches that are already sort of red ocean to such an extent that... At first I take a look on the idea of the products and then I don't have a kind of a checklist of the founder. We just need to, you know, catch some common vibe um in maybe 90 percent of cases the common match happens uh but sometimes if you know it's a kind of can be compared to a dating so if we don't catch the common vibe it will just be not comfortable for me to consult you and for you to follow all my guides all my advices so all my recommendations and so on and if only you feel uncomfortable with the changing something in your product according to my advices then i think we shouldn't continue and sometimes it works in another way sometimes customers who return i mean potential customers who return with the readiness to sign a deal or they react something like you know we had one more call with one of your competitors also a product hunter we decided to choose you because we felt a match something like more match than with him or her and yeah why not yeah there should be some chemistry for sure the interaction between real people in real life even through zoom or google meet window so it's about a good atmosphere and something like this yeah all righty so there seem to be no more questions okay now two questions arrived Before launching a product in the SEO space, how would you recommend doing market research to see a need for the product besides the usual outreach to potential clients? In the SEO space, market research. So I would be like transparent, our product was born out of hype. Just the ChatGPT and getting featured on ChatGPT, everybody was having a huge FOMO and all the marketers started to think about it. So there was not that much of the research. We did some research for the pivot when we were looking for this differentiation angle, when we decided to focus more on the agentic side of things rather than on the prompts. There was a research and our founder how our founder did this. And I think there are some tips for you. He actually visited some SEO conferences as a visitor. And he was just talking to all the people who either gave a talk on some technical aspects of SEO. And so there were people savvy in this industry and quite experienced. And he networked a lot and asked people about their thoughts about this angle, if they've found our idea like meaningful. So visiting such events and asking people. Another thing is outreach to potential clients potential clients works to just to test the pitch more or less. So that's what we are doing as well. Other research, maybe you could now use AI to actually scrape some pain points that people talk about. I know there are a lot of tools that you don't even have to code, but that actually give you some insights about what people talk about on Reddit, like in the forums, because they're usually people ask, like share their pain points and discuss something there quite openly because Reddit is kind of special platform for this. And I made some research by distilling those pain points from the conversations on the forums. Then I would say- Or a tool like Google Trends, right, can just highlight what people are searching for. Of course, I would say customer development interviews, but they are called customer development because you actually talk to people who already pay for some solutions. So what you could do is actually run some interviews with people who use SEO tools in the space that you build a competitor for or a co-pilot for them. don't know what your product is about whether it already has competitors and if there are big competitors like hrefs semrush whatever you can actually find people who use those tools and there are also quite a lot of ways how to find people using the technology and you can invite them for an interview paying them i don't know with amazon gift card or whatever or sometimes they actually open i sometimes take part in interviews just because i like to communicate with people and i do this for free then you can also go to communities of seos and also ask questions there you also can go to reddit and ask your question there customer development interviews are nice because they have a very clear structure about how to ask questions about pain points. And so this is kind of quality research, but you need enough interviews to draw results. So I would say at least 30 interviews to get at least the understanding of the topic. So yeah, I think I already mentioned quite a few ways you can go with the market research. I'm not mentioning buy a market research from an agency. I think it already doesn't work. I don't know what those people do actually at the market research agencies nowadays. I prefer really hands-on approaches like this. Communicate with people, find where they spend time, their communities, and yeah, ask for an interview, ask questions. Yeah, or just create a landing page with lovable or any tool that can help you do this and to just check how people react to this kind of value prep proposition and if they're ready to pay yeah and add the pay button right just like that and see how many people actually hit it uh yeah you know thank you very much we and I think we have a question for Yaroslav right yeah I already read this question um can you assist me once more with the same presentation um the slide will be a seventh because uh since i need to show the answer for this question like visually mm-hmm yeah perfect and let me uh delete and all did it take effect oh it takes perfect uh well so there is no uh strict positions that's the key uh let me delete all the animals and so we have got an empty matrix and let this tesla logotype to symbolize any competitor of your product i have got no idea what market initial are you in and what is your product about so this is another competitor of your product and another and how to position on the matrix you need to just take a look at their materials like landing page from marketing hero below to the very footer and to decompose this marketing materials into sales points product pillars and so on and then to position all these competitors on this beautiful canvas and finally when you think that there are no competitors let's take a look on what fields are empty on this canvas so once again i don't know what theoretical niche we are talking about but i just filled in one two three four five six seven uh competitors and for example we have got know any competitor that who talks about their product in a extremely emotional way focusing on problems maybe it's a not correct approach for this marketing niche no idea but also maybe it's a possibility you knows better about the niche of your product so you will got a chance to decide and for example let's place our product for example here and it will be something like in the middle between and among every other so maybe it will be okay to uh holds a middle between emotional and rational and uh to focus on both benefits and or problems but for some niches that's not a good approach for example if you run antivirus software you will be forced to talk about problems because something like a laptop being corrupted by a virus something like a drainer of damage or files and so on it's a problem to have an antivirus software is not a benefit it's not an advantage it's a painkiller problem solver and something like this but vice versa if we talk about some product that will help me to become a better version of myself then i don't want to focus on any problems in my life i want to be focused on some benefits and advantages that i will receive if only i install your products that based on this idea so there is no correct answer uh where should we where do we want to see our products and there are no strict positions every uh single market is unique something like this cool so it helps you to understand where you are exactly among all the competitors right just to analyze the situations and understand where you are yeah because in our case for instance everybody was screaming don't miss out the hype is growing you have to you have to be you have to get your product to charge a pity and there was a lot of formal and a lot of product positions themselves as don't miss out so you are missing out on this you have to use this tool and so uh we decided that we don't want to to ride the same train. We decided that we want to speak about growth. That's why we put a lot of growth wording and also be a bit more rational and data-driven. So we also added a data-driven approach because all that emotional hype, and it doesn't have data fundamentals. So that's how we stood out from the crowd of apps of apps feeding the FOMO of people looking for tools. Perfect. Yeah, sounds absolutely reasonable. When you could play actually on people's emotions, you decided to go for a longer sort of, a longer lasting effect when you just go through the visuals with this mascot a lovely robot just actually calmly explaining things and and then still you open this landing page and you see the counter with the numbers going up and up and so it gets some pressure i guess well because it's not about this that you should approach landing page visitors to encourage them to still log in sign up for the product and so on okay guys shall we be winding up here there are no more questions right i will stop sharing to get back to the questions yeah okay thanks everyone for the good words and i hope it was helpful and we will definitely be continuing with this topic i think i mean marketing for startups because as founders we face so many questions and so few answers that we definitely need some community and a place where we could talk julia yaroslav thank you very much once again for sharing this friday evening thanks for the invitation it was really nice thank you guys yeah yeah so you can find us on linkedin anyway if you guys are about to tackle product line product hunt issue yaroslav is around so don't miss out on the opportunity to talk and do things right yeah so we're saying goodbye then here and see you next time possibly next month it should definitely be at least one month once a month that we will be keeping um sticking to and um yeah i think i will um add this video to our youtube channel and the youtube channel of yaroslav and you can find us there as well and leave comments likes and everything to help us promote stuff a little bit maybe yaroslav will be able to share the link to his deck of slides so that it will be easier for people to recap what what was about yeah yeah okay okay i'll provide you yeah and actually open up those frameworks at the moment when we will need to go through the fields yeah so until next time then and see you soon

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2️⃣ Contact Vlad Dahskevich and mention Hustle&Grow Product Hunt meetup 💜 
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--------------

In this video a seasoned Product Hunt professional Yaroslav Chuykov explains how to prepare, position, and execute a high-impact launch using a real startup example of Siteline as a case study.

Siteline turns AI agent and bot traffic into actionable insights to improve AI search visibility and drive organic growth. It has been recently ranked #1 on Product Hunt and received a lot of attention from PH community.

Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(01:50) VAIZ | Project management tool for startups
(03:00) Agenda
(05:38) Context behind Siteline from Yulia
25:36 Presentation about Product Hunt launch from Yaroslav
51:00 What results Product Hunt #1 badge brought for Siteline 
54:55 Why founders decide to launch on Product Hunt
58:34 How can an agent who visits the site increase the conversion rate?
01:01 How does Yaroslav filters projects to launch on Product Hunt?
01:08:27 Where do I get ideas if I want to create a product in SEO niche?
1:13:45 How to use a framework with Emotional/Rational and Problems/Benefits to analyze your position against competitors

Follow the link for the PH deck of slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rzMm51nM8jyB3LK5ariwxZKfJ8oFFdYhl65YRcDmOPU/edit?slide=id.p#slide=id.p

Meetup host:
Veronica Sotskaya, Hustle&Grow community founder. 
Growth Marketing manager & co-founder @AddProcess: https://addprocess.pro/

Join Hustle&Grow community in WA to network and be updated about upcoming events:
https://chat.whatsapp.com/Kd0X0wo3xcwDx9lsoJD5V2?mode=hq2tcli

We'd be glad to connect!
Yaroslav Chuykov: https://www.linkedin.com/in/je-suis-yaroslav/
Yulia Nazarenko: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazarenkoyulia/
Veronica Sotskaya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veronica-sotskaya/