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
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
This wasn’t our first time launching Flow, or even launching on Product Hunt.
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 Launch Day Stats (September 1st, 2015)
- ~500 upvotes on Product Hunt*
- 5,540 referral visits from Product Hunt
- 14,168 unique website visitors
- 663 new Flow trials
New Flow Launch Day Stats (March 5th, 2018)
- ~900 Product Hunt upvotes*
- 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
Despite faring a little worse on raw metrics, the launch of the new Flow ended up being a far bigger success than Flow Chat’s. Wait, what?
- 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’ve been using Product Hunt for a few years, but I hadn’t really dug into the details of how to successfully launch on the platform until a few months ago, when we were preparing to launch the new Flow.
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
Personally, I’ve found that working to build relationships generally yields better results than focusing on transactions. This is not new or novel advice. Warren Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger have practiced this for (many) years, and built one of the world’s most valuable businesses doing so.
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
Long before you launch — or even make a launch plan — there’s a few things worth thinking about:
✅ Build a great product
You’re probably sick of reading this advice everywhere, but the reason you’ve seen it everywhere is because it’s just good advice, and it works. Product Hunt wants your interests and the interests of its community to align, and the only way that can happen is if you’re bringing the community something valuable.
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.
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
A successful launch on Product Hunt can be a big part of a successful launch day, delivering good exposure and a nice traffic bump. But, don’t forget about the other components of your launch (promoting on other channels, communicating to customers, etc.), or what comes next (responding to feedback, analysing what did / didn’t work, post-launch promotion, etc.)
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.
✅ Give the Product Hunt community a great deal
Everyone loves a good deal, and Product Hunt’s community is no exception. We knew that a successful launch on Product Hunt would translate to a boost in awareness, traffic, and trials for the new Flow, and that offering a nice incentive was one of the few levers we could pull to help our chances. We decided to go big, and offer a generous discount to new Flow users.
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
When you do launch, the first people you should ask for support are those around you. There’s ways to do this respectfully, and there’s ways to do it that won’t help your chances at getting those people to help, or worse, make them less likely to help you next time.
❌ Don’t Ask anyone (and everyone) in sight for upvotes
This is one of the most annoying things you can do as a marketer. There are many effective ways to let people know about your product — peer pressure and begging should not be at the top of your list.
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
If you need someone’s help, don’t pressure them. Just ask them — preferably in advance of the actual task. Not only is this the more polite thing to do, but if someone actively agrees to do something for you, they’re way more likely to eventually do that thing for you. That’s just how human psychology works.
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
There’s a few ways you can take advantage of the audience you’ve already built, without resorting to begging or spamming.
❌ Don’t blindly mass email/tweet on launch day
Mass emailing your list and batch-DMing all of your Twitter friends asking them to promote your launch might help you reach the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time, but it’s not the most effective way to get support. Not only is this incredibly annoying and largely ineffective, but it can also just look desperate.
✅ Leverage your email list like a reasonable human
A friend once told me that an email inbox is a “to-do list that anyone on the planet can add to.” As an email marketer, it is your responsibility to avoid adding irrelevant crap to people’s inboxes. Be respectful when sending people mail, don’t waste their time, and don’t send them something you wouldn’t like to receive in your inbox yourself.
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.
✅ Target your outreach with Product Hunt Ship
Product Hunt’s Ship service offers a few tools to help you build an audience before your launch — including a simple landing page builder to help you collect the email addresses of people interested in your upcoming product.
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!
✅ Re-use your launch video in (re)marketing campaigns
While not something that will specifically help your Product Hunt launch, this could help you get more value out of your launch materials: If you go to the effort of producing a product video for your launch (and if you can, you should), why limit the size of the audience to just Product Hunt?
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
If you have a website that gets steady traffic, add a (non-annoying) announcement and call to action to alert visitors who might care about your Product Hunt launch that it’s happening.
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
Promoting your launch to new audiences is the focus of the most shameless and disrespectful growth hacks. Some brute force growth tactics may help you win a few more upvotes on launch day, but they could also ensure you’ve burnt bridges you didn’t even think about building yet.
❌ Don’t spam hunters and influencers on Twitter
Another commonly recommended tactic is to @mention hunters and ‘influencers’ to promote your launch, in the hope that they will share it with their audiences. This happens to these people all the time, and they can see right through you. Again, from Product Hunt:
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
Do not reach out to people who won’t like or care about what you’re building. If you waste people’s time enough times, they’ll stop trusting you. In a world where there are a million different things you could be doing or looking at, where there are dozens of different versions of every product, your audience’s trust is key. Don’t lose it.
❌ Don’t join Slack communities or Facebook groups for founders or marketers just to promote your launch, then immediately leave
These tactics poison communities, to the extent that many of these communities have created rules to stop them. Don’t be a part of the problem.
✅ Actually join communities that can help you
Instead, seek out communities that you’re actually interested in engaging with, ask questions, engage and learn from other individuals, and generally act like a good community member.
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.
✅ Make gifs. Lots of gifs.
Aside from being a cripplingly frustrating file format to work with, animated gifs are great! Motion catches the eye, and that can help your product stand out against the crowd (on the Product Hunt homepage, social media feeds, etc).
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.
✅ Spend a little money to promote social posts about launch
You’ve probably put a lot of time and effort into building an audience on Twitter and Facebook, and definitely into preparing for your launch. Spending a few dollars to boost the reach of your launch announcement is a no-brainer.
✅ Build momentum by staggering tactics across launch day, and take advantage of friends in other timezones
People respond to success signals. A lot of our success on Product Hunt was built on top of previous, smaller wins throughout the day. You can’t really ‘create’ momentum out of thin air, but you can feed into and build it.
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
By all means, be as resourceful as you can and work as hard as you can to make sure all of the fundamentals are in place. But also come to terms with the fact that, like a lot of stuff in marketing, startups, and life, circumstance and luck play a huge role in success.
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.
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
Products that are easy for cats to use (like balls of yarn, cat trees and organic catnip) mysteriously shoot up the Product Hunt rankings as soon as they’re posted. This is because Product Hunt is run by a pack of wild cats, and because none of the employees at Product Hunt are able to use human software unless it’s specifically designed for cats.
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.
