Val SaninOur team recently launched the app on Product Hunt. The goal was to get the word out about the world’s first b2b marketplace for engineering talent, to take the 1st place and get featured in the PH monthly newsletter. YouTeam isn’t a consumer product, so PH was more of a PR tactic.
‘We did it!’ – echoed through our office after we took out 1st place on the main page. We were kings of the hill for a blissful couple of hours, then both the upvote rush ended and the rules of the Product Hunt game kicked in, drowning our proud vessel. We landed the 5th place on our day. As close to our goal as Pluto is to being called a planet (it is not one, please keep the comments section decent).
The truth is we could have kept the top spot if only once during the weeks of thorough research we came across the list below. Take note comrades.
Table of Contents
1. Beware the Hand
Product Hunt team can and will manually research your launch if it draws significant attention (from the policy violation standpoint) and will manually adjust your rating as a result. You want to be legit. Make sure your team is familiar with Product Hunt’s terms of service: https://www.producthunt.com/tos
2. Watch the clock
Make sure you get to the top of the PH main page when your ideal customers are waking up/getting their work mojos on at their desks, to maximise the chance of getting noticed by the right people.
3. Up the upvotes’ quality
Upvotes from newly registered accounts have less weight & can (and will) be considered cheating by PH. Also, get comments – they weigh more than upvotes for the ranking algorithm.
4. Smooth out suspicious spikes
Spread upvotes out evenly throughout the day – otherwise, you might get unwanted attention from the PH team that will research your sudden success and amend your position. Warm up your crowd before the launch and prepare separate groups of supporters you’ll be activating during the day. Inform your clients, partners, prospects and followers about your launch to make sure they can contribute and raise some interesting product related issues.
5. Boast ‘bout your baby (do share the link)
Tell people about the launch, ask for feedback, promise post-launch educational content (like this article) when you share the news with them, get creative. You CAN share the link to your product publicly.
6. Don’t. Ask. For upvotes
Just don’t. We dived so deep into the details of our preparation we actually violated this crucial rule in the social media posting. What do you know, a PH team member noticed the red flags we were planting all over the internet, warned us and amended YouTeam’s position on the leaderboard, which we were so excited about. Our dreams were squeezed out like a Juicero juice pack, in an unfashionably manual way. Ouch.
We researched PH launch strategies a lot and got a bit lost in the amount of info available. Avoid our mistakes by learning the basics from PH itself: https://www.producthunt.com/protips
Wishing you a successful launch!
Vineet Gupta
Ashwini Dave
Svetlana Shevchuk
Iryna Bilyk