Launching on Product Hunt: Be #1 of the Week

Welcome to our blog!

This is Mert from the UserGuiding team, and I want to share our experience with our Product Hunt launch.

We have launched the new version of UserGuiding on the 16th of April 2019 and succeeded to be #1 Product of the Week.

And at the end of the year, UserGuiding was 22nd on the list of the most loved products of 2019.

Because this will be a long article, I'll split it into parts that consist of our preparation, the launch day, and the results with actual numbers from our Product Hunt launch.

What is Product Hunt and why it matters?

Before going into details about our launch, I'd like to give some information about Product Hunt for people who are not familiar with it yet.

Product Hunt is an awesome website that lets anyone share and discovers the latest products around. It was founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and is backed by Y Combinator.

When you visit ProductHunt.com, you'll see today's top products, what are they about and how many people have upvoted them. Every day, the products with the most upvotes by Product Hunt users will be the "Top Products of the Day", and the next day people will submit & upvote new products.

Yeah well, looks cool but there are lots of product directories. Why is Product Hunt so unique?

As a result of hard work and dedication of the PH team for years, here are some numbers that show their amazing success:

So, with Product Hunt, you have a chance to show off your product to millions of founders, investors, reporters, and makers - for free.

If you can finish the day with the highest number of upvotes, Product Hunt will include your product in its emails and will tweet about your product. That means thousands of people will hear about it, visit your website and will check out your product.

Especially for individual makers that are bootstrapping their products, this is a wet dream that lasts even after you wake up.  ?

How did we prepare for our Product Hunt launch?

Before starting this part, I'd like to add this article written by Product Hunt people: How to Launch on Product Hunt ?

There are lots of things covered in the article, so I won't go in detail with the basic stuff. Rather than that, I want to give some details about our work before launching on Product Hunt.

Do you need a famous hunter for your launch?

In the article, Product Hunt answers this question with a "no". Because your followers on Product Hunt won't get notified when you "hunt" a product on PH.

So, if you already know someone, it's quite okay to ask for getting posted. But don't waste time on that, just hunt your product as PH says.

Lucky for us, we knew Kevin. He's #1 Hunter on PH. I'm sure that getting posted by him helped us with our initial upvotes (which are very important, see the next section). You can reach Kevin and ask him if he can hunt your product.

Also, if you need to find hunters for your launch, you can check out this website. (Thank you Felipe for mentioning it!)

When should you post on Product Hunt?

The timing of Product Hunt is the San Francisco timezone. So the earlier you hunt your product in this timezone, the more "initial upvotes" you'll have when SF people wake up and see your product on top. That will result in more upvotes for your product and help you finish the day on top as well.

You can check this website that can help you when to launch on Product Hunt:  
https://whattimeisitatproducthunt.com/

Our visual preparation for the launch

We've made research on the products that have done a great job with their Product Hunt launch. Mostly, they had two things in common:

An eye-catching GIF as a thumbnail, and a cool video that explains the product.

Our magician designer Alican created both the GIF and video in a few days. Here they are:

Other preparations on our website & product

I've prepared the embed code for Product Hunt badge before the launch so that we made it live a few seconds after launching.

Also, we've created a product tour on our website by using our own product and welcomed Product Hunt visitors.

We've set the targeting setting of this product tour so that only visitors from Product Hunt saw it. So our visitors immediately engaged with our product and proceeded to actually sign up if they were looking for such a product.

You can click here to see this product tour.

And lastly, we were limiting some features for our free trial users until they subscribe to one of our premium plans. We decided to remove all limits for all users so that Makers from Product Hunt can fully experience UserGuiding and share their feedback with us.

What happened on the launch day?

Kevin hunted UserGuiding 2.0 at 00:30 SF time on the 16th of April, and we immediately activated the Product Hunt badge & segmented product tour on our landing page.

We had a few upvotes before we even started announcing our launch to our network.

Now, time for sharing a post on different channels about our launch. Be careful here. Just like Product Hunt suggested in their article, we gave a direct link to the launch page in our posts but we asked for feedback, didn't ask for upvotes directly.

Here are the channels where we asked people to join the discussion on Product Hunt:

• Related subreddits,
• Y Combinator - Startup School forum,
• Hacker News,
• Linkedin & Facebook & Twitter,
• Slack channels,
• Facebook groups,
• Email to all users.

We already had assigned different channels to someone in our team, so every post was published in around 30 minutes after our launch.

Those initial upvotes & a great discussion on our post helped us reach the top spot - and we managed to stay there the whole day!

And finally.... What are the results of this success?

So, with our UserGuiding 2.0 launch, we managed to be;

• #1 Product of the Day (16th of April 2019),
• #1 Product of the Week (16th of April 2019)
• #3 Product of the Month (April 2019)
• #22 Product of the Year (2019)

Here are some actual numbers from our Analytics:

We got included in the daily, weekly and monthly newsletters. Which led to lots of extra exposure, backlinks on various blogs, shares by influencers, and social media shares.

But most importantly, we had the chance to talk to lots of Makers from all around the world.

• 890 Makers signed up to UserGuiding,
• 160 Makers gave us amazing feedback to help us improve our product,
• 94 Makers took a product demo.

Of course, we are happy with the growth of our MRR. But more importantly, we feel very grateful for talking to so many amazing people in such a short time.

After more than a month, we are still getting lots of traffic with Product Hunt's latest toy: timemachine.betamode.dev

Last words and some suggestions for your launch

Product Hunt is an amazing place to check out the latest products and share your product. Actually, it's incredible that it's free to submit on PH ?

If you are an indie Maker or have a startup with a low budget, Product Hunt is a very strong candidate to be the place that you can find your first users.

Don't overthink it and just launch.

And, get some coffee and food stock for the launch day. You'll be talking to hundreds of people on that day!