How to get #1 on Product Hunt without being a jackass

What we learned from relaunching our SaaS app and earning #1 on Product Hunt, without alienating everyone around us

The 🔑 to success? Cat gifs. If your app has cats, marry them with Product Hunt’s (illustration by Emma Bell)

Back in March we launched the new Flow, which earned #1 on Product Hunt — the world’s most popular new product community. Getting to #1 contributed to an already successful launch, put Flow on a lot of people’s radars, and drove a huge number of new users into the app.

We’d hoped to reach #1, but didn’t exactly expect it. We knew luck would play a huge part, but also did a number of things that gave us a leg up. The single most important one? We successfully avoided alienating absolutely everyone around us.

More on that in a second. First, a trip down memory lane.

Time is a flat circle

Our last big (re)launch was in 2015 when we introduced Flow Chat, which scored #1 on Product Hunt back when the community was younger. This put us in a fairly unique position of being able to benchmark against our own previous efforts.

So, what did that look like?

Flow Chat on Product Hunt

Flow Chat Launch Day Stats (September 1st, 2015)

  • 5,540 referral visits from Product Hunt
  • 14,168 unique website visitors
  • 663 new Flow trials
The new Flow on Product Hunt

New Flow Launch Day Stats (March 5th, 2018)

  • 5,192 referral visits from Product Hunt
  • 11,579 unique website visitors
  • 634 new Flow trials

*It’s impossible to track exact upvote counts for the end of each launch day after the fact, but our team chat logs gave us a pretty accurate ballpark.

In summary: Both Flow launches earned the #1 Product of the day (and #2 of the week), but the new Flow launch delivered slightly less referral traffic, and slightly fewer total trials.

It’s worth noting that not all web referral traffic came from Product Hunt, though: Flow Chat’s launch got a little more press coverage, which also contributed to total traffic and trial numbers.

Success where it (actually) counts

  • Flow Chat was a free product, with zero barrier to entry. A free product is all but guaranteed to attract more users than a free trial.
  • Because Flow Chat was a free product, it didn’t deliver a direct or immediate increase in paying customers (and revenue) at launch.

With this in mind, three months later, one thing is crystal clear: The new Flow attracted a hell of a lot more paying customers than Flow Chat did.

Now, back to what we did to launch on Product Hunt.

So, how can you rank #1 on Product Hunt?

I found tons of good tips, and several great guides — chief among them being this excellent and comprehensive guide by Product Hunt themselves.

I also found a mountain of growth hacks and advice bordering on marketing witchcraft and voodoo about how to ‘game’ Product Hunt. This was also useful — it showed me exactly what we shouldn’t do.

The Tl;dr

The guy doing deals, he wants to do a deal and then unwind it in the near future. It’s totally opposite for us. We like to build lasting relationships. I think our system will work better in the long term than flipping deals.

— Charlie Munger

This advice also happens to apply to marketing broadly, and launching on Product Hunt specifically.

If you only take one thing away from this post, just remember: Relationships > Transactions

With that in mind, I’ve pulled together an overview of some widely recommended launch tactics and considerations, and my two cents on which to use, which to avoid, and some alternatives that worked for us (and are more respectful to everyone involved).

These are broken out into a few sections:

  • Preparing to launch
  • Promoting to friends and acquaintances
  • Promoting to your existing audience
  • Outreach + Promotion tactics

Preparing to launch

✅ Build a great product

That’s why for the better part of the last year, we focused solely on building a better Flow. We spent a lot of that time talking to our customers about how they used Flow, what they needed from Flow, and worked with them to make sure the new product met their needs. We only launched when we were sure that the new Flow was a product that was a great fit for our users.

Listening to (and working with) our customers paid off when it came to collecting social proof

Thankfully, our customers (overwhelmingly) agreed: As of today, three months after launch, over 90% of Flow’s users are now using the new product.

✅ Remember that a successful Product Hunt Launch is just one part of a successful Product Launch

Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover agrees:

Relying on PH, HN, or press in general is a terrible growth strategy. It might give you the bump you need to get to the next milestone, but it’s obviously not sustainable.

Crucially, don’t forget about your existing customers!

Before even thinking about how to launch on Product Hunt, we made sure we had thought long and hard about how to launch to our existing users (a structured beta period, pre-launch, launch and post-launch messaging tailored to different segments of our customer base, etc).

Some companies seem to spend more energy on promoting their products than on actually building them. If you just focus on building something great that people will want, you’ll immediately be head and shoulders above most of the competition.

Borrowing Product Hunt’s cat for our promo graphic may have been most successful part of this tactic (seriously)

✅ Give the Product Hunt community a great deal

Creating a fun graphic to promote this deal, that was also designed to connect with the Product Hunt community (if you didn’t know, cats are a big thing there), also helped.

Promoting to friends and acquaintances

❌ Don’t Ask anyone (and everyone) in sight for upvotes

Think hard about whether you really need to ask acquaintances, friends or family who have no connection to (or reason to be interested in) your product to show support for you on Product Hunt.

Encouraging lots of people to sign up for new accounts and upvote your product over the course of a single day is bound to irritate everyone involved and could end up getting you downvoted on Product Hunt anyway. In Product Hunt’s own words:

Please keep in mind that upvotes that are considered by the system as spammy can end up damaging to the overall ranking.

✅ (Politely) ask for help

Dogfooding: We used Flow to keep track of all of our launch activities

Systematizing this process helped us a lot: We tasked our team with listing all of their relevant friends and acquaintances, and tracked outreach and contact status using Flow.

Also: Don’t forget to say thank you! When you’re dealing with people online, it can be easy to forget common courtesy. If someone went out of their way to help you promote your product, the least you can do is thank them.

Promoting to your existing audience

❌ Don’t blindly mass email/tweet on launch day

✅ Leverage your email list like a reasonable human

As a general rule, it’s safe to assume anyone signed up to your mailing list probably wants to hear about your product, but not safe to assume all of them know what Product Hunt is (or care).

That doesn’t mean you can’t respectfully announce your launch to your entire list, though. One example: Instead of mass-emailing your entire list about your Product Hunt launch, include a note or P.S.(and secondary call to action) about your PH launch in emails announcing your release.

This is a far less pushy and more respectful way of alerting those in your audience who care about Product Hunt that they can support you there.

The new Flow’s Upcoming landing page, powered by Product Hunt Ship

✅ Target your outreach with Product Hunt Ship

Once you’ve collected people’s emails, you can use Ship to email them directly. You can also import your existing email subscribers and use Ship to message your entire list (and boost your landing page’s subscriber count to reflect the true size of your total audience).

You can send subscribers as many updates as you like, but there’s a couple of obvious opportunities you won’t want to miss:

  • A week or so before launch: send a short message to remind subscribers about your product, and let them know it’s coming soon (usually best to avoid giving a specific date — plans change). This is a great opportunity to announce the sweet, exclusive deal you’re giving them, and only them.
  • On launch day: send a message to announce that the product is now live!
I designed our launch video to work on Product Hunt, but also to fit into other contexts like ads on YouTube and Facebook, and (with minimal edits) on our website

✅ Re-use your launch video in (re)marketing campaigns

Video marketing and retargeting on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram is cheap, easy, and generally pretty effective. If you run any paid acquisition efforts, consider doing this.

✅ If you can, drive referral traffic from you website

The Product hunt popup we ran on our website during launch week

We set up a simple popup that ran for our launch week. It didn’t send a huge amount of referral traffic to Product Hunt, but it was well-qualified, and every little helps. Remember to disable this after your launch is over: you generally don’t want to be directing qualified traffic away from your product!

Outreach + Promotion tactics

❌ Don’t spam hunters and influencers on Twitter

You don’t need to reach out to ‘top hunters’ or influencers to get your product hunted. Ultimately the community upvotes products they like and find useful, so it’s far more important to build something awesome and clearly communicate its value to the world.

Now, that’s not to say that a little tactical outreach here or there can’t work when your product is actually relevant or interesting to recipients, but mass messaging on a hope and a prayer is more likely to piss off the very people you’re trying to attract. Again, relationships trump transactions: Focus on building healthy, human relationships with relevant people.

✅ (Respectfully) leverage your extended network

❌ Don’t join Slack communities or Facebook groups for founders or marketers just to promote your launch, then immediately leave

✅ Actually join communities that can help you

If you’re willing to do this, there are some great places online for healthy self-promotion, such as Online Genius’s #shameless_plug, and numerous Facebook groups and subreddits.

On Product Hunt, anything you can do to stand our against the crowd helps

✅ Make gifs. Lots of gifs.

People also just quite like gifs, because gifs can be fun, and people like sharing fun things with their friends and followers. Anything you can do to make your product more fun and likely to be shared = good.

Product Hunt also likes gifs: They were even kind enough to turn part of of our launch video into a gif, which they (and Ryan) shared several times throughout launch day

✅ Spend a little money to promote social posts about launch

✅ Build momentum by staggering tactics across launch day, and take advantage of friends in other timezones

One way we found effective to built momentum is to work in stages. For example: Creating a ‘mini launch’ in another time zone helped us create enough initial traction to quickly rise up the Product Hunt homepage (while everyone in North America was asleep). This initial traction certainly helped put Flow in front of bleary eyed Americans (and Canadians) when they checked out Product Hunt first thing in the morning, and things snowballed from there.

Staggering communications throughout the day (UK launch, then social media and blog launch a few hours later, followed by batches of emails to different parts of our email list throughout the day, followed by social media updates and sponsored posts, etc.) also helped grow the snowball.

✅ Accept the role of luck

Case in point: a topic of debate the week before we launched was whether we should do so on Tuesday or Wednesday, which are (apparently) the days when Product Hunt is busiest. We chose Tuesday, and we’re lucky we did, because the very next day the #1 product on the site earned more upvotes than we got. That product, I kid you not, was called ‘Overflow,’ which means that if we had launched on the Wednesday, we would have been ranked in second place behind a product called Overflow.

Over Flow: Things could have looked quite different for us if we had launched one day later

Accept what is beyond your control (like luck), focus on what is actually in your control (the fundamentals), and you’ll have a much healthier attitude towards everything you do (and people will like you more, probably).

✅ FINAL BONUS HACK: Spend months labouring over a secret “cat-friendly” mode hidden in your product’s source code

Product Hunt CEO Ryan Hoover

Here’s what Product Hunt CEO Ryan Hoover (who is a cat just like the rest of his employees) thinks of people who want to spam his platform:

What we’re trying to avoid is behavior that hurts the community, like unsolicited mass outreach (spamming people) or trying to game the system to get more upvotes (what the community finds “popular”).

P.S. This kind of behavior is very easy to spot (and often corroborated by screenshots that people send us). Also, please keep in mind that upvotes that are considered by the system as spammy can end up damaging to the overall ranking.

Ryan hates spammers (and baths), but loves good products — especially if they incorporate design and interactions easy for cats like him to use.

We did that with the new version of Flow. It’s the only real way to ‘hack’ the platform, and it’s the main reason we got #1 on Product Hunt.

(But actually, make cat gifs 👍)

Product Hunt

The place to discover your next favorite thing.

Aidan Hornsby

Written by

Founder of DoubleUp (DoubleUp.agency), co-founder of Supercast (supercast.com). Admirer of simplicity, fan of excess. Sharing notes at booknotes.email

Product Hunt

The place to discover your next favorite thing.

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