Got 400+ upvotes on ProductHunt, and 200+ users. Good things we did and mistakes we made
Hi folks,
We launched our product on ProductHunt last Wednesday and are glad to achieve 400+ upvotes and 200+ users. There are tons of articles you will find about the launch checklist but I will talk especially about some not-to-dos and things that precisely helped us to get good results.
The product we launched was SocialBu (PH page link is at the bottom). It's an AI-powered complete social media suite to improve your social media presence and maximize your results. Generate, Publish, Respond, Analyze, and Automate your social media
2 things that helped us a lot:
Scheduled launch for Wednesday (high-traffic):
We scheduled the launch for 1st Feb (Wednesday). Traffic on PH is usually at its peak from Tuesday to Thursday. We ranked 6th but got good traction due to high traffic. If your goal is to come in the top 5 then you can go for a weekend day launch (low competition) but you might not get enough traffic that day. Launch during weekdays gives your product more exposure.
Created a Hub page and got subscribers on that page before launch:
Hub page is like having a teaser of your upcoming product launch. People can visit that page, see product details and select 'Notify Me' to get notified when the product is live. This is very useful and gives you a good push as all the followers get notified and support you, especially at the start of the day.
Note: You can create Hub Page only if you have scheduled your product launch.
Mistakes that we made:
Asked our friends & users to support us:
Unless your user base and friends are very active on PH, you should not tell them about the launch and ask them for support. If they are not active and go to your product page to support you, it will make PH think that they just came to upvote this particular product. Their upvote/comment will have almost zero or negative weightage. You can share stats or good news with them after the launch. We shared links with our friends to support us. Most of them already had PH accounts but weren't active members. Their support wasn't good for us. PH is 10 years old community and they have built their system to deal with such scenarios of course.
Couldn't reach out to enough influential users:
In order to achieve a successful launch, it is important to build relationships with members who hold high visibility on the platform and have a good number of followers/points. Their upvote/comment holds more weight than the normal users.
Some friends made new accounts to support us:
Some of our close friends made new PH accounts and supported us. But it affected our ranking negatively though their intention wasn't bad. I remember there was one product that had around 30 upvotes less than us but was ranking above us.
PH page link to see stats: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/socialbu-2
Hope it helps :)
Good point with the friends that want to help but have a negative effect, thank you!
This is great. Thank you! I will definitely take note of these points before launching mine
You are welcome :)
We launched Suggesty AI on Saturday and were awarded the product of the day. I published the news in my Telegram channel with a few thousand followers, which was enough to get us off to a good start. Organic traffic then followed suit.
We didn't get any paid customers for our product, and now it has become part of Cmd J (I am a developer)
https://twitter.com/cmdj_app
Definitely, these mistakes will help us not to repeat them in our PH Lunch. Thank you
Good luck :)
@heyumarkhan thanks for your telling us about your mistakes which will help us to avoid in the future for our product Churnfree.
You are right about the upvote from friends they create a new account or inactive account that just came on your post and upvote it. It's not good thanks again for this valuable information.
:)
Congrats on the launch, thanks for sharing the lessons :)
Thanks for the kind words! It's always nice to hear from someone who has taken the time to learn from my experience.
Congrats, 400+ not bad!
thank you!
Thanks for sharing your experience with us, it's really helpful. Launching a product on ProductHunt can be a great way to get some initial traction, and I'm glad to see that your launch was successful. Your tips about scheduling the launch for a high-traffic day and creating a Hub page to get subscribers are really insightful.
Regarding installation Smithfield, I'm curious to know if you had any challenges in the installation process or if Smithfield helped you with the installation. I'm planning to get a new product installed, and I'm looking for a reliable service provider like Smithfield who can help me with the installation.
We launched the product on Producunt: Fordeer Invoice Order Printer that works on Shopify. Indeed, it is a valuable experience when users are friends to log in and support, but it has the opposite effect. We thank you for this meaningful sharing and will prepare to run again in a few months with a quality update.
Thnaks so much.
These are great insights. Thanks so much.
I see why they are doing this, but there should be a way to rewards for organic PH traffic.
For example if you have a post that takes off on Reddit and many people come to your PH because of it, sign in and upvote - that must count for something.
I also had a similar experience - getting quite a few more upvotes than other products that day but ranked lower (I assume) because many of the upvotes were made by new PH account :(
Almost the same experience I had with PH last year :)
great learning!! thanks
My experiences with Product Hunt have been less than satisfactory. Despite several launches, none of them have ranked well. I believe it's difficult to bounce back unless you receive a significant number of early votes, but that's just my personal speculation and I could be mistaken.
While it can be difficult to recover from a poor start, there are still ways to make up lost ground. It's important to focus on marketing and promotion prior to launch day in order to get the most out of the platform.