How to Launch on Product Hunt 🚀

There are dozens of different articles and posts, each promising to be the “Ultimate Guide to launching on Product Hunt.” While the intentions of the authors are good and most of the recommendations accurate, each article unwittingly contains misinformation that we’ll address throughout this post.

In this post we’ll cover:

• How to launch on Product Hunt
• The key things to focus on
• What to avoid doing
• How to prepare in advance
• How to market your product
• Bonus Section: How to get promoted by the official Product Hunt Twitter and Facebook accounts, and how to make it into the Newsletter which reaches hundreds of thousands of readers every day (even after your launch). 💌

Disclaimer: None of this advice guarantees 1,000 upvotes, news coverage, or lots of new users and traffic – these are best practices for a successful launch. Additionally, the best practices may change as the Product Hunt platform evolves based on your feedback. We’re constantly building new features (like Ask and Upcoming) and experimenting with new ideas to better surface awesome products and help makers find users.

How to Launch Checklist

People often email us (hello@producthunt.com) and individual members of the team to tell us about their product and asking for tips. We’ll go into why this is not a very effective way of getting featured on the homepage later in the post, but tips we’re happy to give! 😺

Below is a list of things you should do when launching on Product Hunt:

• Get it on Product Hunt: If the product hasn’t been hunted it cannot be featured. You can post something new here. If you don’t have access, signup and follow these steps to get contributor access or ask a friend for an invite. 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.
• Links: Add your product or company website as the primary link, followed by links to the App Store, Google Play, and other places where people can download or use the product where applicable.
• Name: Just the name of your product. Nothing crazy!
• Tagline: Describe what your product does in under 60 characters. Be specific! Communicate the value your product provides to the people you’re trying to reach, even if that means leaving out 95% of the features. Avoid slogans, optimize for how users search for products after launch day. Quick slogan check: if your tagline starts with “the world’s best…” you should probably come up with something new. 🙃

• Thumbnail: Describe the product visually. This might be shown best as a static image, or subtle GIF to help capture attention. For some products the entire value prop can be communicated through a GIF animation (see Jack Dweck’s Pitch with a GIF collection).
• Gallery: This is the best real estate to show off your product and the first thing people see when entering your post. Upload at least two assets at a minimum — the order is important. If you upload a video (via YouTube link) it will always show up first. Have at least one image/GIF that’s “tweetable” — that is, rectangular (roughly 2:1 ratio) that shows up well on social. Make it easy for people (and us) to promote what you made. P.S. Images/GIFs should ideally be under 3MB.
• Description: Add a 1–2 sentence description of your product that appears under the gallery images to give users a little more information about you’re working on. Short, to-the-point sentences work best!
• Topics: Only choose 3–4 topics for your product. While your product might have a great user experience, please don’t add “User Experience” as a topic. An iPhone camera app might include “iPhone” and “Photography Tools,” whereas a product management app might include “Productivity,” “Designer Tools,” and “Developer Tools.”
• Makers: When possible, always add the usernames of everyone that worked on the product — personal accounts only. This allows them to join the conversation and receive recognition for their hard work. As an added bonus, followers of each maker receive a notification on launch day, resulting in more discovery so make sure to add all your teammates. You need to have a Product Hunt account to be added as a maker. P.S. It’s better to link your account to both Twitter and Facebook so more of your friends can find you.

• Media: You can now add links from around the web related to your product. Add any news publications, Medium articles, product reviews, or funding announcements in in this section to help people learn more about your product/company.
• Maker Comment: Briefly introduce yourself, the team, and the problem that you’re solving. In a total of 3–4 sentences explain what the value prop is, what’s the use case, who its for, and why you are building it. If this is the second time you’re launching on PH (i.e. a big product update or huge feature announcement), explain what’s changed. Tip: Make it as easy as possible for people to care. For example, if you’re a 16 year-old launching your first product and answering questions in the middle of math class… THAT is what you should lead with. If you have a business background and taught yourself to code — tell people. Create a narrative that makes people relate and want to help you.

Social links: You can now add your company’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, and AngelList profiles to your post! They’ll show up right on the sidebar, and if you have any open job listings on AngelList add those as well. The best time to attract new candidates is launch. 😉🚀

Bonus Tips:

• Offers: PH users love a good deal. Feel free to include a special promotion or offer in your opening comment. These special launch day offers can increase engagement, help capture people’s attention, and encourage people to try what you’re working on (e.g. 20% off for 6 months). P.S. Giving community members early access by distributing promo codes via the comments can work wonders. ✨
• Ask for Feedback: Conversation is important. To get the discussion going and solicit feedback, ASK. Let the community know what kind of input you’re looking for (e.g. Let me know what you think about X, Y, Z features). Products that have active conversations generate more interest and tend to do well overall.

What Not To Do

These usually come down to marketing. The solution: Don’t be spammy.

• Do not ask for upvotes anywhere. Feel free to ask for feedback, but asking for upvotes is a big no-no. People should upvote the product because they like it, not because they’re peer pressured into doing so.
• Don’t spam people. Mass-tweeting/emailing people unsolicited, asking for feedback or upvotes, even if they’ve upvoted similar products in the past isn’t effective. If your timeline is filled with dozens of identical messages, that is not the way to go about it. Be authentic. 😊
• Thunderclap. On a similar note, tools like Thunderclap that shout about your launch are notoriously ineffective — it comes across as spammy, and the super secret algorithm doesn’t like spammy.
• Finding a “Hunter”. Feel free to hunt your own product. Having someone else posting is fine, but spending lots of time “finding a hunter” is a distraction. You know your product better than anyone else, and it makes very little difference who hunts the product and how well it performs overall. Follow these steps to get contributor access.
• Linking to “producthunt.com”. Link directly to your product page. Linking to “producthunt.com” only makes it harder for people to find you and doesn’t have any effect on the algorithm at all. It seems to be “common knowledge” that you’re punished for linking directly to your product page — it’s simply not true. Focus on communicating what your product does. P.S. Linking to producthunt.com is one of the clearest indications you may be “over-optimizing” your launch (gaming the system).

A note on this section: To be clear, it’s important to share your product and get the word out. The core metric we’re working toward as a company is directly related to people discovering your product. Our interests are aligned.

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.

You’re better off focusing on authentic ways of connecting with users and thinking of creative ways of promoting your product. In the next sections we’ll cover what we’ve seen work particularly well for makers, including what you can start doing ahead of time. 💫

Pre-Launch (Months Away)

• Familiarize Yourself with Product Hunt: If you’ve never checked out Product Hunt before, signup (no company accounts). Spend a few days exploring, follow topics, and make friends in the comments. Your account should be tied to your real identity so people know who they’re speaking with. You can start by asking questions and recommending products on Ask Product Hunt. 🙂
• Create a List of Mentors & Advisors: These are people who you can ask to support your launch on their various social medias. Build real relationships. Avoid the mass tweeting/emailing that goes on a day before launch.
• Build an Audience from the Beginning: Whether that’s using a Product Hunt Upcoming page (example, more on that below) or a landing page, start collecting emails of people interested in your product. We’ve seen founders curate Slack teams or Facebook groups with future customers or beta-testers. Having a small group of people who use your product prior to launch is one of the most important things you can do.
• Product Hunt Upcoming Pages: This new tool will be available for everyone soon (we recently shared more details in the newsletter). See what it looks like at: producthunt.com/upcoming/upcoming 🔮

Hunting Process

The Product Hunt homepage is organized into two different lists of hunted products: “Popular” and “Newest.” Every product that is hunted appears in the Newest tab, but only the most popular products appear in the Popular section (hence the name 😉). It’s everybody’s goal to get featured, but if you follow the steps above your chances of being featured on the homepage will increase.

There are two ways to get your product hunted: hunt it yourself or ask someone else to hunt it for you. People often hunt products they like without contacting the makers first, so if your product is out in the wild, we recommend submitting to Product Hunt sooner rather than later. Generally, the community is eager to discover cool new products first, even if they’re not “perfect”.

• Getting Contributor Access: If you don’t have access to hunt, simply follow these steps or ask a friend for an invite. We want you to be part of the community and our goal is to help make your launch successful and discover new products.
• Hunt Your Own Product: As mentioned earlier, please hunt your own product, it will save you time, and give you full control over launch day logistics. It can actually hurt your chances if you cold email, DM, or tweet at random hunters asking for their help. We spend all day on Twitter and see when founders/companies inauthentically spam community members (this matters because the same group of people often get approached, some multiple times a day).
• The Hunter: On a related note, it makes little difference who hunts the product. It used to matter, back in the day when we sent email notification to the hunter’s followers, but we stopped doing that a long time ago. Your time is better spent gathering a small group of people months in advance that are excited about what you are building, rather than an “influencer” who may have little context.
• Best Time To Post: There is no single best time, but there are considerations to keep in mind. The homepage is based on a 24 hour cycle, new products hit the homepage at 12:01am PST and are added throughout the day. We tend to stop featuring new products for the day around 11am PST — if something posted after that time gets featured, we’ll bump it to the next day to ensure it doesn’t get buried. There is no “magic” time to post, but it’s best practice to do it before 9am PT so there’s enough time in the day for people to discover and discuss your latest creation.

Example 1: The Boring Company

Name: The name of the company. Perfect 👌

Tagline: “Elon Musk’s new company, creating tunnels for traffic” — the tagline is straight to the point and self-explanatory.

Description: “The Boring Company is an infrastructure and tunneling company founded by Elon Musk to cut down on traffic & improve our vehicular transportation.” Again, straight to the point & self-explanatory.

Topics: The three topics (Cars, Transportation, Tech) all directly relate to the actual product (a network of underground tunnels for cars).

Thumbnail: The thumbnail (a GIF, in this case) clearly demonstrates the product’s functionality and core features.

Gallery: The gallery includes a YouTube video showcasing the product and a number of pictures/GIFs that help frame its functionality.

Media: Three different articles are included, each offering a different aspect of the company’s progress. Anything that illustrates your company’s mission, progress, and tells the story of what you’re about.

Makers: Still waiting for Elon to jump on… but we can confirm that he received the two Golden Kitty trophies we sent him. 📬

Example 2: Polymail

Links: The page links directly to the Polymail website and the download links to the App Store.

Name: Again, just the name of the product (Polymail).

Tagline: Correctly capitalized with a clear description of their core product.

Description: Two concise, clear sentences about the core product offering & the suite of features that Polymail offers.

Topics: They added the correct number of Topics (2–4) — an iOS/Mac email app is a good fit for Productivity, Email, and Tech.

Thumbnail: Even without a flashy GIF as their thumbnail, Polymail received 4700 upvotes and a Golden Kitty Award at the end of the year. Sometimes, a simple logo is all you need.

Gallery: The Polymail team put together some screenshots from the core app features of the app (with interesting text if you look closely). Custom PH-themed GIFs or images seem to always do well. 😉

Makers: The entire team is added as Makers, not just the founder or CEO.

Social Links: The Polymail team added in their AngelList, GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, and Medium accounts.

Comment: Brandon’s comment is short, informative, and humble — a wonderful tone to strike when launching. He offered a clear explanation of the core differentiation between Polymail and its competitors as well.

Offer: The Polymail team spent all day inviting Product Hunt users who commented with invite codes to their beta. This is a great example of an offer that the community loves (early access), distributed in a public way that generates interest and encourages others to try out the product.

Marketing/Promoting Your Product

In this section we’ll share some tips on marketing your product. There is no one-size-fits-all and context matters a lot. Below you’ll find some effective techniques used by others in the past. Note that you can and should try multiple approaches (i.e. personal “we just launched!” vs. informative “here’s what you can do with…”). Asking your network to help spread the word is always a plus.

Tweeting/Sharing on Facebook

• General Tips: Communicate what the product does, include an image/GIF that grabs people’s attention, no hashtags, and tag @ProductHunt. We look for makers/company launch tweets (and Facebook posts) that we can amplify by retweeting or sharing from our accounts. 🚀
• Make it Personal: Posts that lead with “I just launched my first product!”, “After months of hard work, we’re ready to share what we’ve been working on…” resonates with people and can attract a broad audience. Authenticity works best.
• What to Emphasize: The first words you use are important, lead with something that grabs attention. What is the one thing that will resonate with people about you as the maker, and try to connect that to the core value your product could provide for them.
• Link directly to your product page: Not to producthunt.com
• Don’t use hashtags: Or, limit use of hashtags. Hashtags are blue, the URL you want people to click on is also blue, when @ mentioning people that’s blue as well. Too much blue dilutes the blue URL of your product that you want people to click on. P.S. Hashtags are completely ineffective unless they happen to already be trending on Twitter (as they do during live events or newsworthy topics). Outside of that, people don’t click on them and they’ll distract from the flow of your tweet structure ;)
• Photos vs. Videos vs. GIFs: Don’t rely on Twitter preview images, use an attachment. This will help your tweet stand out in people’s timelines (preview images may not expand and just show up as a URL depending on the Twitter client). Video can work well if they are raw demos (shot from smartphone) or not overly produced (it depends, generalizations don’t help here), but overall, videos will lead to less clicks to your product. We’ve found that GIFs work best for finding the right balance between grabbing people’s attention, communicating info about the product, but not giving away too much upfront in a way that limits clicks back to your product (from @ProductHunt we use GIFs often, and even have an entire @ProductHuntGIFs Twitter that only tweets GIF content).
• Tag vs. @ mention: Tag people in photos instead of @ mentioning them to have a cleaner post (less “blue”), unless you specifically want to highlight the person as part of the content (rather then get their attention). You can only tag in photos, not in video or GIF attachment.

How to Really Promote Your Product

There is only so much that you (or we) can do to market your product. The key is to get everyone that’s visiting the site, on their own accord, to share your product. You can do that by clearly explaining what your product is and the value it provides. Get people to feel something.

The name “Pitch Decks From Top Startups” communicates everything you need to know upfront. The tagline “A collection of startup pitch decks that raised $700million”, gallery images of popular startups, and the maker’s comment all work together to reinforce the value prop.

Other times, the name itself doesn’t say much. Take for example a new app called Muzzle.

The tagline: “Silence embarrassing notifications while screensharing” clearly explains what the product does: blocks notifications. But note that the tagline could have easily been “Automatically turn on Do Not Disturb when screensharing” …which likely wouldn’t lead to this kind of reaction:

Get people to feel something. By using the word “embarrassing” in a situation most people can imagine themselves in (screensharing) it makes the audience relate and instantly understand the problem the product addresses (even if it’s not a situation they’ll likely find themselves in).

Here are some other popular tweets about Muzzle:

🔥 Dave: Best landing page ever?

🔥 Ben: “Best landing page everrrr”

🔥 Andreas: “Best. Landing. Page. Ever.”

🔥 Ryan: “Best landing page demo I’ve seen this year”

Show people. The Muzzle team not only did a good job of describing what they made, they also created a hilarious landing page that turns people’s screens into the embarrassing situation. The landing page made people laugh, while demonstrating the product’s use case.

Think of ways to demonstrate a specific use that gets someone who has never seen your product before instantly get it. GIFs are often the fastest way of getting people there, while enabling them to easily share (Giphy Capture and CloudApp are both easy to use and community favorites).

P.S. Including a photo that shows you, your team, or visuals that tell your story can work particularly well on social.

P.S. For anyone, not just makers launching products: You are more than welcome to share any product using the tips mentioned above. We actively look for good content to retweet regardless of when it was launched (just make sure to tag @ProductHunt so we see it and link back to the site). 🙌

Product Hunt Newsletter

We send a newsletter to hundreds of thousands of readers every weekday with the previous day’s top 5 most upvoted products. The best thing you can do to make it into the digest is focus on having a successful launch, using the tips we provided. Subscribe. 💌

You can also be featured in the newsletter after your launch.

The first part of the newsletter highlights product collections, timely topics, product recommendations, a big product launch, and basically any time Instagram decides to ⌘C ⌘V Snap. This is the biggest source of traffic from the newsletter in terms of what people click on.

If you’d like to be featured in the newsletter, here are the things we look for:

• Curate Collections: Create content around your product. If you just launched a super cool alarm clock app, curate a “morning tools that make you more productive” collection. Doing so provides us with cool content to share with the community. If we use your collection we’ll be sure to give you a shout out. Let us know if you made a collection or have a concept in mind (you can ping our newsletter editor directly on Twitter or Email).
• Ask Product Hunt: This relatively new section of the site is gaining momentum and a common source of inspiration for future newsletters. We encourage you to participate by asking questions and providing product recommendations. Get started: producthunt.com/ask