Learnings from our Producthunt Launch

Producthunt is one of the biggest community to reach out to potential users and even to acquire paid customers. We launched our product Browsee on a Tuesday and we learned quite a few things regarding our launch, upvotes as well as on improving our signup and onboarding flows.

What Time and Which Days are Preferable to Launch?

I read quite a bit before launching my product on Producthunt. One of the learnings that was super useful for me was:

Always launch your product at midnight that is 12am PST irrespective of the day

This will give the community a lot more chance throughout the day to upvote your product. You have to understand that the majority of the users in the Producthunt community come from the US and hence you need to optimize your launch time accordingly. Just to avoid any last-minute chaos, you can easily schedule your launch on Producthunt. You can more read about scheduling and what do you need to launch on PH from here.

The launch days are a bit tricky as on some days the eyeballs are pretty low like Saturdays and Sundays, which will affect the number of eyeballs on your product as well. This might result in a lower number of Upvotes as well as Signups. Then, there are days like Mondays and Tuesdays, where the eyeballs are going to be maximum but some of the big companies like Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft, etc also launch a feature or a small product on such days. It will be hard to predict whether any big shot will be launching in the week you want to launch but they will definitely get more visibility as they already have followers as well as some level of product love which will attract more eyeballs towards them.

When we launched, we saw the launch products from Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, Figma and a couple of launched from Adobe in the same week. They all planned their releases on Monday or Tuesday and after that, I did not see any product from big shots in the week.

Plan your launch on Wednesday, Tuesday or Thursday in the order of preference

Launch Yourself or Ask an Influencer?

Influencers usually have a lot of followers on Producthunt who will use your product. For example, Kat Manalac has submitted around 170 products on Producthunt till date and has 6k followers. She is a partner at YC and hence a lot of comapines in YC prefer to get their product submitted via her to get more and more eyeballs from the community.

When we launched Browsee, there was a YC incubated startup Glide Pro that became #1 on product hunt. They got their product submitted by Ben Tossell who has submitted around 1000 products to date and has 13k followers.

I read somewhere that one should submit the product by themselves to have more control over the minute launch details. But, I think with the scheduling feature of PH, it will be as easy for someone else to prepare the minute details. Hence, if you can approach someone who can submit the product for you, I think it will be worth it as you can get a lot more eyeballs because their followers will get a notification! We submitted our product by ourselves and we had 24 followers in our account :)

Though it is true that product quality and value proposition is going to determine your rank of the day, no harm in getting more eyeballs by asking an influencer to submit it for you (if you can)!

What to do on Launch Day?

So, you launched your product and now you have a duty to try to give your product more visibility. You can ask your existing users and maybe some of the friends to upvote your product for the initial uplift. You can also publish about your launch on other communities like Indie Hackers etc.

I should also warn you here that please do not try any spamming as we saw some of the products getting a lot of upvotes in the starting ended up outside the top 10 products. I think PH has started punishing people for any spam upvote methods.

Do not try any spamming methods to get more upvotes!

We initially thought that the number of upvotes is going to determine the rank of the day but actually they have some methodology where the ranks are determined by a mix of a number of upvotes and the acceleration with which you got those upvotes! So, you should not put all your effort for asking upvotes at the same time. This effort should also be distributed throughout the day as not only the total upvotes but the acceleration with which you got the upvotes is also going to matter unless there is a huge upvotes difference.

Distribute the time in which you will promote your PH launch link throughout the day. Do not ask for all the upvotes in the initial period.

You have to realize that Producthunt will give you traffic for throughout the week and not on only the day you have launched your product. So, if you will end up in the top 5 products, you will get more and more traffic throughout the week. Atleast try to be in the top 10 products!

Try to be in the top 10 products of the day if not in top 5!

Thanks to Ryan Hoover and everyone at Producthunt for building such a powerful community!

If you are a small startup and you are going to launch on Producthunt, be prepared to log all the data as you are probably going to get a lot of views, signups, and integrations in a chunk. This will give you a better understanding of:

1. How people are using your product?
2. Whether your signup flow is optimized?
3. Whether your signup to usage flow is optimized?
4. What are they loving and what they do not?

You can use any session replay tool to understand these points like we used Browsee for ourselves in our case. We optimized quite a few things on the day of launch itself which improved the ratio of our views to signups and signups to integrations in the day itself.

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