How to nail Product Hunt: A guide to become #1 Product of the Day

“Every software company needs to launch on Product Hunt”. Or at least that’s the impression you get when you see the hype around it. But is it really worth it? For who is it suited? When’s the right point in time to launch your product?

There are a lot of tips and tricks out there when it comes to a successful launch on Product Hunt. Of course, you need to have the basics covered. But as every company is unique, a different approach might be required.

Here’s a tactical guide from our personal Product Hunt journey. Hope it can serve as a useful guide for fellow founders to achieve a successful launch.

TL;DR - Summary

1. Set the Scene - Clearly define your goals for the launch. Strategically choose your launch date and hunter (if any) in line with this goal.
2. Create a compelling launch page and teaser - Submit your product with compelling visuals, an authentic but clear video and a killer tagline to spark interest and make sure it pops up in the right search results.
3. Fine-tune your Product - Brainstorm with the product team on impactful quick fixes, but don't let a marketing campaign dictate product priorities. Focus on adjustments that best support your launch goals.
4. Leverage the Power of community, strategically - ****A killer outreach strategy equals launch success. Build your audience list, plan your outreach with clear CTAs, and rally your community early. Get your top customers hyped and ready to drop comments on launch day!
5. Promote it early on - Stand out, but stay authentic - Follow the marketing rule of 7: ensure people see your launch multiple times and make it stand out. Use social media, embed badges, and update your email signature. Your first launch is a celebration, make it sound like one.
6. Make a Launch Day Plan - Have your team own different topics on launch day. Make sure you cover all areas during every hour of your launch and align your team on the plan.
7. Nail your Launch & Enjoy the Process! - When your product goes live, it’s time to trust the process and rely on your launch day plan. And most importantly: enjoy the process!
8. Leverage the post-launch momentum - Keep the launch buzz going by running ads, following up on feedback, and shooting for Product of the Week or Month. Flaunt those Product Hunt badges as social proof on your socials, website, and in outreach to wow potential clients!
9. Analyze the results - To make your Product Hunt launch come full circle, revisit your initial goals to see if your plan and execution hit the mark.

Is a Product Hunt launch for me?

What is Product Hunt?

Product Hunt is a vibrant community of tech enthusiasts and early adopters who love discovering and sharing new products. Being featured as the Product of the Day or even the Week or Month is the holy grail to significantly boost your visibility, attract potential users, and validate your idea.

Why should you do it?

The key drivers of launching on Product Hunt include gathering feedback and enhancing brand awareness.

Product Hunt’s launch guide suggests that, among others, the most common reasons people launch on Product Hunt are to:

• Boost reach and organic traffic through the website and a feature in the newsletters
• Gather feedback on product and product-market fit early on
• Collect social proof in the form of reviews, testimonials and badges

Additionally, a reason not listed by Product Hunt but important for us was getting a strong backlink to our page.

Now, it seems like there are enough reasons to do it. But is it the right channel to invest in for you? Let’s take a deep-dive.

Should you launch your product?

Launching on Product Hunt can have significants benefits, when done right. There are a few points to keep in mind when considering a launch.

1. What does Product Hunt say? Product Hunt provides its own checklist for anyone to check if launching would be a good fit for them. They advise on launching products that are new, innovative, usable, high-quality and of unique value with a trustworthy maker, which is what Product Hunt calls the builders and creators of a product on their platform. If you had any previous launches, the product you’re launching should have had substantive product improvements since its last launch. You can go through the full list here .
2. Are your GTM model and product features favoring a launch? Generally, Product Hunt works very well for B2C tools or those tools you can test out immediately (e.g. free-trial, freemium). Most products on Product Hunt have a tech or software focus, and of course with the rise of AI, there is a steep increase in products with AI features. Although the AI hype might attract quite some eyeballs, it makes the space more crowded and provides the opportunity for cool products to stand out even more.
3. What's your product stage? Look into the stage of your product and whether it aligns with your goal. On the one hand, if you are looking for feedback on your product early on, it could be a good move to launch early to get insights into the community’s thoughts on it. On the other hand, the impact of your launch could be bigger if you launch with a good working product that already has a decent customer base.
4. What target group do you want to reach? Think about the target group you’d like to reach with the launch. Does it fit your ICP and hence allows you to connect with potential customers? The majority are smaller to mid-sized companies, who are usually US based. Is this the type of customer you want to enhance your brand awareness with?
5. Will a launch generate sufficient value compared to the resources and time you'll spend on it? Finally, when considering a launch, it’s valuable to look into the return on investment (ROI) it will provide you. Do you think it will generate sufficient value for you compared to the time, effort and resources that will be spent on it (which you could spent on other initiatives)? In this regard, a risk analysis and mitigation plan could provide more clarity.

Some risks we considered and that you might want to as well:

• Is there a risk for negative comments or reviews and what will be the impact if there is any
• Website or portal performance issues
• Product is not well perceived & our UVP is not understood
• A lot of low quality inbound leads and requests on intercom
• Low interaction on our launch

If you’ve done the analysis and reached the conclusion that a launch would be beneficial, the only thing to check before diving into the journey, is when you will officially start.

When should you start?

The earlier, the better.

The earlier you start activating the community the better. My suggestion would be to start the latest 6 to 8 weeks before your launch date. Start off with defining your goals. Ask yourself, what’s in it for me? Why do we want to do it? Who are we going to reach on PH? What is our ultimate goal? Then continue by drafting a launch day plan with deliverables each week and prioritize the things that will take more time, like for example activating your network or product improvements.

Now that you’ve defined whether a Product Hunt launch is for you, let’s take a look at the different steps that are needed to succeed in a successful Product Hunt journey.

Our 9-step journey to a successful launch

1. Set the scene

Define your goal

Before you start on Product Hunt you should ask yourself: Why are we doing this, what’s in it for us?

The first step was to define what we wanted to achieve with our launch. From our conversations with Cheska from Butter, our first design partner at Cello, we understood that sales-wise our launch would not necessarily lead to a high amount of high-quality leads or ICPs. So if your main goal of your launch is generating quality leads, you should take into account that only a small fraction of inbound leads will be of quality. For us, it was around 20%, which is still quite a good number (compare it to quality leads coming from paid ads for example).

Overall, we wanted to focus on five pillars:

1. Creating brand awareness in the (US) tech community, across SaaS companies
2. Getting product of the day to earn the badge for social proof
3. Gathering feedback from the community
4. Generating inbound leads
5. Getting featured in the Product Hunt newsletter

In the last step of this guide (9. Analyze the Results), I deep-dive into our results and whether we have met our goals described in these five pillars.

Select a launch date

Choosing the right launch date can have a significant impact. It’s crucial to align your launch date strategically with your goal. A few points to take into account:

• For high engagement or brand awareness, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays are ideal as these days generate the highest traffic and engagement.
• For simply getting the Product of the Day badge, weekends or Fridays are quieter but less competitive.
• It’s hard to know exactly which brands will be launching when. However, we found a way to identify this for products that are launching for the first time (see the pro tip below). Nevertheless, this is something that is not really in your control. Rather focus on making your own launch successful.
• And if you’ve finally chosen a date and it turns out to be a competitive day with other bigger brands launching, you can still look at the bright side: it might help you boost your product as the traffic will be higher.

?? Pro Tip - If it’s a product’s first launch, you can find out its launch date. Start by checking the ‘Coming Soon’ section as it lists the upcoming launches in chronological order. You will see the teaser pages of the upcoming launches, which is a brief preview of a new product designed to build anticipation before its official launch. For the companies that are launching for the first time, you can find out the launch date. Just change the word 'products' to 'posts' in the URL (for example: producthunt.com/products/cello to producthunt.com/posts/cello ) and the date for which the launch is scheduled will pop up. However, companies might reschedule their launch last minute or some might not even have a teaser page up.

In Cello’s case, we chose for Tuesday June 4th for several reasons:

• Launching on a Tuesday aligned with our goal for brand awareness.
• Choosing a date early in the week and month increased our chances of becoming Product of the Week or Month.

Hunting down a hunter

There are a lot of different opinions when it comes to getting a Hunter for your Product Hunt launch. Our take on this: Do it, but choose wisely!

We chose Chris Messina as our hunter and also had calls with different hunters to gather insights for Cello’s launch. The approach of each hunter is different: some require you to book a (paid) consultancy call, others you can just reach out to by submitting your product. For Chris himself, we booked a consulting call where he dived deeper into Product Hunt and answered the questions we had prepared. During this call, he also agreed to be our hunter.

One of the insights that we gained from having a call with Kevin William David, was that having a top hunter helps you get into the featured list, which is important to get traction during the first four hours of your launch, when upvotes are still hidden. It also might help you have a more credible perception. After those four hours, when the upvote number is revealed, the featured list shows the products according to their ranking.

Your choice of hunter should also be aligned with your goal. You can for example choose to go for a hunter that has credibility in your industry / space. People follow this person because they are interested in the space the hunter is active in. Hence, you are able to reach your target audience more effectively.

For inspiration on Product Hunt hunters, you can check out my post on top hunters .

When you’re done setting the scene for your launch, it’s time to start creating your Product page and teaser.

2. Create a compelling launch page and teaser

Before your actual launch, you can prepare your Product Hunt page, which will become visible on launch day. Additionally, starting 30 days before your launch, you can create a teaser page of your product that will be featured under ‘Coming soon’. People can follow this page to be notified of your launch on the day it goes live. Hence, an important asset to activate people beforehand.

All teaser page links have the following format: www.producthunt.com/products/cello . From your launch day onwards, this link will bring you to your product page as your teaser page will no longer exist. If you replace the ‘products’ by ‘posts’ in this link you will be directed to the launch page of any product, even those that are launching soon. As touched upon before, we used this trick to check when a company would be launching, and it also allows you to check the product description, visuals and makers they have added to their product hub before the launch.

How to submit your product?

If you click on your profile icon in the upper right corner, you will have the option to select ‘My Products’, under which you’ll see all your previous and upcoming launches. Here, you can create a new post and schedule its launch. Only when you’ve done that, you can create a teaser page. However, when you’re working with an external hunter (not one of your makers), they will be the one submitting the product and creating the teaser page based on what you communicate with them.

These are the most important resources you’ll need to submit your product:

• Product visuals and description: important here, is to make your visuals point to the main highlights of your product. We decided to go with one key phrase on each graphic to highlight our USP. Ideally, your visuals include a video as it lets users grasp the idea of your product instantly. We’ve come across various formats: from founder-led Loom videos to more expensive looking, animated product demos. Pro tip: keep it authentic and simple so people are able to understand your product easily.
• Hunter’s & Founder’s Note: these are the first comments you’ll see under the launch.
• Tagline: initially, our tagline aimed to spark curiosity so we could generate clicks to our Product Hunt page. We chose to go for ‘Word-of-mouth on autopilot’. However, after launch day, we decided to change it to ‘Easiest way to add a referral program to your SaaS’. Why? First of all, we decided to run a promotional campaign and a tagline with a clear UVP would be most effective for brand awareness. Secondly, search results within Product Hunt are based on the product’s tagline. If someone would look for the keyword ‘referral’, we would want Cello to pop up as a result.

?? Pro Tip - Strategically choose your tagline in line with your goal: do you want it to spark curiosity, point to your UVP or have it as clear as possible? Think about the keywords people associate with your product and try to incorporate those so your product will show up in those search results.

For a full overview and detailed description on all the assets you need, you can check out Matteo Tittarelli’s guide on Reforge.

Besides your Product Hunt page, your product itself is obviously your biggest asset in this launch, so let’s look into what fine-tuning you can do.

3. Fine-tune your Product

Make sure your product provides a seamless experience to everyone that wants to check out your product.

Before our launch, we aligned internally with the product team on where adjustments needed to be made. Although we decided not to change a whole lot on the product, we agreed on quick fixes that would have a positive impact on the launch.

We started with mapping the customer journey to ensure a seamless experience. In our case, these are the few adjustments we’ve made for our launch day:

• My co-founder and CTO Bob made a new product demo video to welcome new users trying Cello and give them the highlights of our product, ensuring a clearer understanding of our product.
• We fast-tracked a newly designed homepage for our demo environment, in which new sign ups would land to explore our product. This was planned irrespectively of the launch, but we shortlisted it because it would positively impact our launch.
• We embedded a Product Hunt badge into our website and portal so that all page visitors would be directed to our teaser or launch page.

Of course, it is key that you adapt to what makes sense for you and your goals!

You’ve set the stage, finalized your Product Hunt page and finetuned your product. Now, it’s time to spread the word on what you’ve been creating.

4. Leverage the power of community, strategically

I would argue this to be the most crucial aspect of a successful launch.

Product Hunt community

Product Hunt favors authentic connections and generally speaking, people want to support people that provide value to them or the community.

A few weeks before our launch, I started engaging with the Product Hunt community on a daily basis. On one hand, this helped me understand the ins and outs of Product Hunt a bit better: what do people look for in products that are launching, what are pain points, but also general tips that could help in a successful launch. On the other hand, interacting with other launches and discussions was a way of providing value to the community and building connections. If you have the capacity, I would recommend to start doing this even earlier.

?? Pro Tip - Let your team set up accounts at least a month (ideally earlier!) before your launch. If everyone engages on the platforms for 10 minutes daily, you can gain quite a bit of traction.

Make sure you and your team have the basics covered when setting up a profile, so Product Hunt acknowledges your profile and doesn’t classify you as a bot.

• Profile picture
• Headline
• Interests
• Any personal links you’d want to add (LinkedIn, X, your product website)
• Follow some people
• Interact with some launches

A concrete example of what I would do: I would look for discussion topics your product could be relevant and would engage in a conversation here and drop our teaser page. This way, you aren’t only promoting your launch, but actually investing your time in getting your product to the people that actually need it/would use it.

These daily interactions might have resulted in a slight impact in our successful launch, but it was definitely not the ‘big win’ (after all, lots of people are there just to promote their launch).

Now, there is something that worked especially well for us: personal outreach. Two weeks before our launch, we started reaching out to other founders and (growth) marketeers that we ran into on Product Hunt. You can find these people by scrolling through the launch archive and checking who interacted with previous launches. We then used Linkedin to reach out with a direct request and asked them their thoughts on Cello. Turned out a lot of them were eager to check it out and support us!

?? Pro Tip - This personal outreach can also serve as a great outbound channel for sales.

An important note here is to reach out to people that have a high number of Kitty/Karma points. This is a signal of their activity on Product Hunt and how much their contributions are valued by the community. Our research showed that the Product Hunt algorithm favors interactions of profiles with a high number of points. Moreover, it presumably also penalizes fresh profiles that do not have any interaction yet. Those might be considered a bot and thus interactions from these type of profiles will be deleted by Product Hunt itself.

Why did this approach work really well for our launch? It is one thing to activate your personal network (also super important!). However, if you can additionally activate people that are already active in the Product Hunt community, as they will know the drill and are naturally curious to learn about the newest products. In this way, we didn’t only engage with them on Product Hunt, we also built our own little community on LinkedIn with people that were happy to support us on our launch day and beyond. These people are now part of your network and will indirectly impact your sales funnel.

Stakeholders & personal network

Leverage your team’s personal network. Let’s say you’re a team of 15 people. If everyone gets 20 people in their network to support your launch, you already have 300 supporters!

The key to this is: start on time! As mentioned in the previous section, Product Hunt analyzes your interactions and deletes ‘empty’ votes, meaning votes they believe are coming from bots (or people that just signed up) because they have no previous interactions on the platform. Hence, it is crucial to activate your personal network well enough in advance.

One key advice would be to make an audience list with an outreach plan that contains:

• Who are your stakeholders and to whom of those you want to reach out
• When will you reach out to them (eg 2 weeks in advance to set up a profile and then again on launch day)
• Via which channel are you reaching out
• What is the CTA (eg create an account, follow teaser page, reshare our social media post for reach, support us on Product Hunt etc.)

Here’s a list of stakeholders we included in our audience list:

• Investors
• Applicants
• Customers
• Engaged leads
• Friends & Family
• Other founders in our network
• Social media community

?? Pro Tip - When asking for support from our customers, we went the extra mile for our top customers, we would call ambassadors. As we know the great results they are seeing with Cello and the close connection we have with them, they were eager to leave a comment and/or review on our launch page to share their experience. Reach out to those with a personal message and ask them if they could share their experience in the comments.

Leveraging your community is one of your most important assets. Next, let’s look at some other channels that could help you market your launch.

5. Promote it early on - Stand out, but stay authentic

Stand out

If you want to make your launch stand out, you’ll have to get creative!

We wanted to give that extra twist to our launch so we gathered with the Cello team for a creative brainstorm. Butter’s launch served as an inspiration for us: they held a 24 hour workshop on their own platform. For us, such approach would not make sense, but we still wanted to do something special. There were some other ideas on the table as well, like a founder-led livestream with a Q&A format.

After our brainstorm, we decided to hold a raffle on LinkedIn and X where we would give away our limited-edition fluffy Cello jacket and the newest MacBook Air . The condition was: help us spread the word! Our goal behind the idea was to create virality. We ended up getting 21K+ impressions, 210+ likes, 149 comments and 33 reposts.

?? Pro Tip - If you’re thinking about organizing a similar idea, it’s important to know you cannot incentivize people to upvote your product on Product Hunt directly. Hence, never ask for an upvote directly, ask for support. Alternatively, you can ask people to help you spread the word.

Be unavoidable

Besides trying to get creative to stand out, we also tried to make small tweaks that would make it impossible to miss our launch. Besides social media posts and personal outreach, we also embedded our launch announcement in our email signatures, LinkedIn banners, website and product portal. For the latter, you can just extract the code from Product Hunt and embed it in your website to add the badge. Check out this quick guide for the specifics.

Stay authentic

Authenticity is key when building a community for Product Hunt. Know WHY you do it. For us at Cello, it was a key milestone in our building journey and our goal was to create awareness. Hence, we didn’t solely want to focus on asking people to vote for us. Instead, we also provided insights on how this journey has been for us in the form of a LinkedIn post series.

Every day, I shared a new insight that our team has gained by building Cello. I believe such authentic connections based on building in public and sharing insights, are key to build a strong community that is willing to support.

So leading up to our launch, I shared some insights on the following topics:

• Organizational Design
• Hiring
• Sales & Marketing
• Strategy
• Product Development

Same goes for authenticity when interacting with the Product Hunt community, whether it be in the discussions or your launch page comments. You want to get authentic and honest feedback of users. Embrace the challenging questions and the constructive comments - they provide you insights on how you can do even better!

Now you’ve done most of the preparatory work, it’s time to look at launch day itself!

6. Make a Launch Day Plan

When your launch day finally arrives, things might get chaotic as there is so much to think about.

A few things that might be on your plate that day:

• Continuous outreach throughout the day to various stakeholder groups
• Managing incoming traffic and leads
• Monitoring your intercom
• Updating your audience through social media posts
• Engaging with Product Hunt comments
• And probably extinguishing a whole lot of last minute fires

My main advice is to make a launch day plan beforehand and delegate the workload. This will make sure the whole team is aligned on what the goal is and how we will reach it.

To give you a head start on some inspiration, here’s our boilerplate.

You’re all set: prepared and planned! Launch day is here and you can start seeing you hard work pay off!

7. Nail your Launch & Enjoy the Process!

Yay, it’s launch day! Today is the day you’ve built towards and you will see all that preparation pay off. So the most important thing is: enjoy! (and follow your launch day plan ??) - and you’ll be fine!

First things first

When your product officially goes live at 9:01 CET, your teaser page will be converted in a your launch page and your product visuals, hunter and maker comments will become visible to everyone. People can start upvoting and commenting on your launch, as well as leaving reviews on your product.

Now you have 24 hours to make your launch successful. The first step is to get the word out immediately, so have your social post ready (or scheduled) and make sure your team interacts with the launch (by upvoting and commenting). Then start activating the rest of your community.

When comments start coming in, make sure you have someone on your team (any maker, but ideally one of the founders) respond to these as promptly as possible.

Remember: the first four hours, when upvotes are still hidden, are crucial to gain traction. Until 1pm CET, Product Hunt decides which products to feature. After that, products will be shown according to their ranking (based on upvotes and comments). It is thus crucial to get a top spot if you want to drive organic traffic to your launch and create a momentum.

?? Pro Tip - If you’re an EU-based startup, take advantage of leveraging these 4 first hours, so you can be in the lead when the US wakes up.

?? Pro Tip - Take into account that your ranking will be based on a combination of upvotes and comments. It is thus not only the number of upvotes that counts, although you will often see the companies witht he highest number of upvotes in the lead.

Strategically activate your community

The most important topic on your launch day plan is activating the audience list you’ve built over the last few weeks. A successful launch keeps up the initial traction throughout the day. This means you should make sure that people engage with your launch throughout the entire day, and not just the first hour of your launch.

To monitor this, we used this tool which made it possible to analyze our relative and absolute growth throughout the entire day.

Personally, in order to keep our traction up the entire day, we divided our community in time zones. When your product launches (at 9am CET), your European community is just waking up and in Asia / Oceania, they are already halfway through the day. Hence, these were the first groups we would reach out to about our launch. Only around 6pm CET, we would start activating our American community. This proved to be very effective for us, as our traction has seen a steady increase during those 24 hours.

Enjoy the process

Don’t forget to enjoy the process. Working towards our launch and especially launch day proved to be a great team bonding experience. A part of our team gathered in Munich, where our HQ is based. Our aim was to stay awake for the full 24 hours, but in the end we did get a few hours of sleep when we saw we were in the clear for a while.

Building towards this common goal has definitely brought our team closer together. We are able to look back on a dynamic day, where everyone worked together to make this a success for Cello!

Congrats on the launch! Hopefully, you got tons of feedback and are able to celebrate a successful day.

8. Leverage the post-launch momentum

Your launch day is important, but it is what you do with it that will impact your results. In the aftermath, there is several things you can do to leverage the launch momentum you’ve built. The most prominent ones are running an ad campaign, doing follow-ups, leveraging your social proof and analyzing the results.

Ad campaign

You can choose to run an ad campaign on Product Hunt after your launch day. Your launch will then be featured as ‘Promoted’ between other more recent launches. This can help you in keeping up the momentum and reach from launch day.

Follow-up on leads and feedback

Be assured that you’ll get quite some feedback by launching your product. Feedback may come from Product Hunt comments or people reaching out to you directly. Depending on the specific questions that are asked, you can also gather insights on what the customer is looking for and the most wanted product features. Definitely assemble all of these so your team can take it into account for the product roadmap.

Product of the Week and Month

It’s not over until it’s over. The momentum of your launch day can help you build towards Product of the Week or even Month. Continue your outreach and leverage channels you haven’t used on launch day yet, to reach the full potential of your launch.

Social proof

If you get a Product Hunt badge (eg #1 Product of the Day), it will be a confirmation of your hard work. Not only for your launch, but overall for building a great product that people love. Earning any badge can serve as good social proof of your brand. Make sure to leverage it on your social media, website and even in outreach to potential new clients.

Finally, time to wrap up your Product Hunt journey with a full result analysis.

9. Analyze the Results

To make your Product Hunt launch go full circle, you’ll have to go back to the start and check in with the goals you had set. Did your plan and execution align with these goals? Your objective metrics will give you the best indication if your launch has been successful.

Here’s a few of our results from Cello’s launch from our entire campaign period (about 7 weeks).

Goal #1 - Increase brand awareness ?

Our website had an increase in impressions (+197%) and new visitor sessions (+135% p.p.) and our social media engagement surged (+452% p.p.). Our organic search and direct traffic also showed a steep increase.

Goal #2 - “Product of the Day” badge ?

We reached #1 Product of the Day, #1 Product of the Week and #2 Product of the Month (#1 for Marketing).

Goal #3 - Gathering feedback ?

We were able to gather useful input from Product Hunt users through our launch page and LinkedIn direct messages.

Goal #4 - Drive inbound leads ?

Our qualified sign ups increased (+170%), with 20% of all leads being converted into a deal (which means they were high-quality leads). We already have two customers live that came through Product Hunt.

Goal #5 - Being covered in PH newsletter ?

If you reach Product of the Day and Week, you are automatically featured in the daily and weekly newsletter under ‘Top Products’. Additionally, the newsletter might include you under other sections as well, which is decided by Product Hunt itself.

Cello was featured in the PH newsletter four times.

• On launch day - in the Maker's Corner
• After launch day - as top product of the day and week and in the 'More Launch Stories' segment

Overall, we’re happy with the journey! Our Product Hunt launch has been an experience that has both benefited our team cohesion and our business results. If you plan accordingly and focus on the things that are important for you, launching on Product Hunt can be a tool for awareness and valuable insights.