How to launch on Product Hunt - Tips to get Upvotes

If you're thinking about launching on Product Hunt, you're in the right place because recently I launched my product Lead Landing, got a bunch of upvotes, but most importantly, got a lot of valuable learnings. So in this video, I'm going to be sharing with you everything you have to know about launching on Product Hunt. And that includes best practices to maximize upvotes, things you should avoid doing, and I'll even share with you what the submission process looks like so you can start preparing ahead of time. And later in this video, I will also share with you the statistics behind the launch of my own product. So how many upvotes I got, how many people visited my website and how many people ended up signing up. So stick around for that. If you're new to it, here's a quick breakdown. Product Hunt is a directory in which people can post the products they built and get feedback. The website is laid out in a framework in which every day at midnight, there's a fresh batch of new products dropping. These can be accessed under a list of products of the day. After the day of your launch, you will still have a discoverable Product Hunt page. However, it will only really be there at the top of the website on the day that launch so now that we have that clear and before we go into the actual submission of it you're probably wondering well if my product is only going to be available for one day then what's the point what do i even get out of it and the answer is you get four main things firstly a public searchable record of your product so when people google your product chances are your product submission will be visible and accessible secondly credibility product hunt is very well known amongst indie hackers, solo developers, entrepreneurs, small companies, startups, etc. And they actually make it super easy for you to be able to copy their tag and add it to your website. I did it with mine and I recommend after you launch that you do it with yours as well. Thirdly, backlinks. This helps a lot with SEO because Product Hunt is a website with a high domain ranking, which means that their backlink is actually quite strong and valuable. If you're in the early stages of building up your website, chances are your domain will not be carrying as much strength so having this valuable backlink will be super useful and fourth and arguably the most important benefit is getting feedback early on from an engaged community some people on product hunt are super active they will actively review your product at an early stage and give you feedback that you can use to iterate on your own product now of course the caveat is that if you're not building for tech people chances are you will not find the most valuable feedback here but still it is super helpful to hear the opinion of others and as you start preparing your launch i want to keep your expectations realistic most days over 300 products launch on product hunt so the competition is massive most of the products actually only get between zero and two upvotes and you're probably thinking zero to two why can't people just get their friends and family to upvote them so that they get ranked higher well it doesn't really work like that and i'll tell you later in this video exactly why but if you're able to get over 10 upvotes that's generally really good especially if you don't have a prior community or a prior list of people who already follow your product. If you prepare ahead of time however getting 50 plus votes is realistic and honestly the goal is to be as high as possible. In fact you want to be just high enough so that people don't have to click on the expand button to be able to see your product because if you're there the visibility that you'll get is much higher and then it just ends up compounding. It's a snowball effect where most people have eyeballs on your product, most people will upvote it, most people will visit your website and sign up as well but you've heard me talk for far too long and i think it's time for us to jump into the actual submission so if you're on product hunt you're going to be able to see this button that says submit and click on launch a product now for me in specific i've already launched a product so you can see here launching again but let's assume that this is your first product you go here and you add your url and then click get started is this a new launch? I'm going to say yes even though in my case it's not really my first launch that's why I'm getting this and it's already detecting some information about my product but in your case it will be relatively empty so in the main info this is where you have to add the name of your launch and that is limited to 40 characters this is what the name of the launch looks like then you have to add a tagline so prepare a tagline where people can see a very very short description of what your product does and it has to be under 60 characters. If you then scroll down, you're gonna be able to add links and your ex account, or if this is an open source project, but the most important really is the description of your launch. Here you have 500 characters, so it's much longer. You can be a little bit more descriptive of what your product is about. And then you can add launch tags. Launch tags are super important, and you can click here and see all of them. But basically people who are interested in certain segments categories such as amazon or marketing or sales they can find your product through those lists and then lastly you want to write your first comment a first comment is also very important because when people go into your launch page they will be able to see your comments right there and you can use it for you to introduce your products the problem that you identified that that you thought was worth solving etc this is what my first comment looked like as you can see right here so you can take some inspiration from that you will then go to images and media and i think this is probably one of the most important things that you can do in your submission so make sure to prepare this ahead of time you want to create a short video perhaps around a minute or so displaying your product and showing how it actually adds value to people as well as put some product screenshots or images that you think clarify the use of of your products and in my case this is what it actually looked like you then can add makers so if you made it with something with someone else or if you're hunting someone else's products as well as extras so is it is your product free is it paid do you want to offer a promo code for people to use it etc and then at the end there's a launch checklist where essentially says this is everything that you filled and this is everything that you have so it's pretty standard it's pretty basic but i think the most important thing is that you probably should prepare ahead of time you probably should spend some time crafting a perfect product demo making sure that your images are super crisp and clear I've seen a lot of submissions, especially the ones that are towards the bottom of the list, not having the images in the right dimensions or just having one image or not having a first comment. And all of that can backfire on you and it will contribute to your launch not being as successful as you probably want it to be. So take all of this, start preparing well ahead of time. Now let's jump into best practices. What are the things that you should do when you launch on Product Hunt? Well, the first is you should probably create an account between two and four weeks before your actual launch. Prepare your product, prepare all of these things that I mentioned such as the tagline and the company name and the description and start collecting some momentum. Start collecting followers, start sharing it with people but also engaging with a community. And that actually leads me to the second point. Join the X and Reddit product hunt communities. Here you can see what other people are dropping, you can see how people are talking to each other, you can see how feedback normally goes and this is going to be super important because as you ramp up towards your launch, you want to make sure that you're part of those communities and that you're able to leverage on them for early stage engagement. Number three, when you launch, share what you built, share why you built it, share what problem you're solving and the story behind it all. People are interested in knowing what caused you to actually solve this problem as opposed to just saying, hey, here's a product that I built. So if you're able to say, hey, this is my background, i decided to do this i'd love your feedback on my landing page or my approach people are a lot more likely to engage as opposed to just saying hey can you go support my launch and then fourth you have to understand the product hunt algorithm it's all about these four things velocity account age diversity and comments velocity is how quick you are getting upvotes and engagement so especially as soon as you drop you want to make sure that you get the most momentum as possible account age is essentially the establishment that you have within product hunt you and the people that upvote you ideally if they have a long establishment of historically upvoting other people engaging with other people chances are those upvotes and that engagement is going to be more powerful on your own product diversity is good because essentially product hunt really values feedback from different people from different backgrounds from different industries from different countries so if you have like a pool of people that are very similar and they're all voting you that's not as powerful as being upvoted from a diverse set of people and then comments comments are really overlooked because people focus a lot more on upvotes but the product algorithm actually values comments even more so a product launch with let's say 40 upvotes and 20 comments is actually a lot more valuable than 70 votes but only two comments because upvotes are easy to brush off and they can be fabricated but comments genuinely engaged community members asking about your product can be a lot more helpful and when i show you later in this video the statistics behind my own launch you will understand why and the last best practice that you have to know is that the first four hours are absolutely everything as i mentioned before getting the right momentum at the right time is crucial and within the first four hours product hunt actually doesn't show you the statistics so you can't see how many upvotes you've had you can't really see how many comments you're having you can't see how well you rank against other products on the same day and that's on purpose that's to reduce the amount of anxiety people get but you still want to make sure that you're sending out your emails you're engaging with any comments that you get you are engaging with the rest of the community you're sending your product to the people who said they were going to support you and give you feedback because the momentum that you get in these four hours will end up defining how you rank as soon as the list is dropped and that can then turn into a snowball effect where you have more eyeballs more visibility etc now what are the things that you should actually not do when you launch a product on product hunt the very first thing is to ask friends and family to upvote you if you ask your parents your partner your best friends to create an account and to go and upvote you product hunt will most likely suppress it allegedly it will not penalize you but those upvotes will temporarily appear and then disappear the comments will not even make it to your page and trust me i did have a couple of friends who tried to upvote me and i quickly realized that they weren't actually being shown so there was no point in doing that and that's why you actually see some product launches with zero upvotes because those founders didn't put enough effort into engaging with the community the second thing is that you should never really pay for anyone to boost your product hunt launch on the day when i announced my launch i got a bunch of messages perhaps five different people that i didn't know reached out to me and they said hey listen loved your products so glad to connect and then shortly after the question quickly became into oh by the way i can push you to a group on my telegram or my whatsapp community of 300 product voters and they will give you a vote if you pay me for a fee so in this person specific was asking me for 40 irrespective of what the amount is and what their promise is you should never really pay product hunt has a good algorithm they will be able to detect this swarm of people and bots up voting you and you will most likely get a penalty for doing that if not being suppressed completely. And then even if you get a bunch of upvotes, what is the point of it? You're not going to get any signups from it. It's fabricated hype. How does that add any value? So yeah, I recommend you to never pay for anyone who claims hook it. That can push your product launch. And then the third thing you shouldn't do is go on public communities and actively ask for upvotes. Never ask for an upvote, ask for feedback. Because if you're asking for upvotes, you're essentially trying to hack the system or cheat the system and it's not really well seen. If product hunt kind of gets a whiff that you're doing this, chances are your product again is going to be suppressed and you're not going to get any of the benefits of actually launching there, which is the early stage engagement and feedback from a community that actually cares about products. So yeah, don't ask for upvotes, ask for feedback. But now it's time for me to share my actual results from my product launch. I launched a product called Lead Landing and if you don't know about it, it essentially allows for anyone to prompt a landing page and launch it with built-in forms, analytics, database, etc. So this is really ideal for people who are trying to, for example, build a waitlist or collect leads or even test a new idea because the platform comes with analytics embedded. Now, on the day of my launch, I actually got 14 upvotes. Now, bear in mind, I didn't have a prior community or anything like that. I made the mistake of creating my account literally three days before my drop. I wasn't super keen on it. I just decided to kind of do it because I thought it would be a good experience. And it was. But that obviously resulted in me not getting a huge amount of upvotes. I also got ranked as product number 74 of the day, which given the fact that more than 330 products launched on the day that I launched, it is a pretty good result. I then also got one more upvote but it was just after midnight which means it didn't actually count for that for the maths of the day but hey here I get to see my product hunt at 15 upvotes which is quite cool. Now what about the actual results? Let me show you my website statistics right here. I did my product hunt launch in this time frame and I want you to take a second and guess which one of these days did I launch my product on. If you guess this one you're actually wrong because this was actually the day that I launched my product. It didn't give me the biggest boost of traffic ever. In fact, launching on Product Hunt got 43 people to actually visit my website. And you know what? Out of those 43 people, can you guess how many actually signed up? The answer is four. Only four people signed up on that day. That's just under 10%. And the reason for that is because most people were just curious about my product. They were my target audience. Whereas on the day before, where I only got 22 people visiting my website, five people signed up. That is almost 25% as opposed to less than 10% on the day of my launch. So launching on Product Hunt can be important, but it's not really all that. Don't expect it to change your business overnight. Don't expect it to go super viral because realistically for most of us, that's not really going to be the case. And being super honest about it, if your target audience isn't really tech people, indie hackers, solo developers, startup entrepreneurs, then chances are you're not going to get the biggest benefits that Product Hunt has to offer. You should also not expect sustained traffic directly after your launch, because as you can see, on the day I got a boost, I got a spike, but then the days after it kind of fell flat. So launching on Product Hunt is important, but remember, it is only one part of an overall strategy. You should have a lot more things complementing it, because on the day that I had the biggest amount of traffic and the biggest number of signups was actually a day that I I replied to some comments of people who were interested in launching a landing page on Facebook groups. So you really have to be able to identify where your users are and then talk to them there, not necessarily just on Product Hunt. So yeah, those are my two cents. I hope you found this video useful. I wish you the best of luck for your Product Hunt job. Make sure to engage with my page. And if you want my engagement and support, I'm normally around these communities. I'm always happy to give feedback and engage with the community. Again, thank you so much for watching. give this video a like if you liked it comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe because i have a lot more cool content coming soon thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in my next video

In this video I'm sharing with you everything you need to know about launching on Product Hunt and that includes Best Practices, things NOT to do, and stats behind my own product's launch.

Full guide and communities to join: https://www.sellingwithnas.com/how-to-launch-a-product-on-product-hunt
Check out LeadLanding: https://www.leadlanding.dev/

00:00 - Intro
00:34 - Introduction to Product Hunt
00:58 - Why launch on Product Hunt
02:15 - Expectations about launching
03:21 - Product Hunt Submission Process
06:20 - Best Practices about launching on PH
09:42 - What NOT to do when you launch on PH
11:59 - My Product Launch on PH

#producthunt