On January 27, 2022, Softr won the "Product of the Year 2021" in Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty Awards. If it wasn’t for our community and a well-executed plan on how to launch successfully on the Product Hunt, there wouldn’t be a slight chance of scoring any results.
This was not our only milestone related to Product Hunt. Our first launch was in 2020 and, in a short amount of time, we managed to win over Product Hunt’s large, very engaged community of early adopters and tech enthusiasts. It didn’t even stop there: our second launch was even more successful. See for yourself:
Some of the amazing apps built with Softr have managed to follow our steps and become community favorites and crave the path for themselves.
Keep in mind, there are around 20,000 apps launched on Product Hunt every month with around 30-40 published daily. Going into Product Hunt without a plan is like going to a battle without weapons.
In this article, we want to share with you the tested practices we’ve used to reach such results.
Table of Contents
- The beginning: The simple steps of launching on Product Hunt
- Tip 1: Add a discount/special offer
- Tip 2: Schedule your launch
- Tip 3: Choose the best time to post
- Tip 4: Find a hunter or hunt yourself
- Tip 5: Ask for feedback
- Useful Tools
- Tip 6: Don’t spam the hell out of hunters
- Tip 7: If you can’t be your hunter's first product of the day, don’t even bother
- Tip 8: Don't focus too much on Product Hunt, work on your product
- Tip 9: Avoid low-quality votes
- Showtime: Made with Softr
The beginning: The simple steps of launching on Product Hunt
Begin the process of launching on Product Hunt by identifying the most important and obvious steps that need to be taken. The first thing is preparing all the assets and content for launching the product. Here's what you need to prepare prior to and during the launch:
Logo: JPG or GIF. Square. Recommended size: 240x240. Max size: 2MB. If you're looking for a hassle-free design experience, consider using a logo maker to craft the perfect logo for your needs.
Title: Just the name of your product. Descriptions or emojis are highly discouraged. Should be 40 characters or less.
Tagline: < 60 characters.
Description: < 260 characters. Short, to-the-point sentences make wonders.
Topics: Choose three that best describe your product (e.g. No-Code, SaaS, Developer Tools).
Social links: Add your company’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram profiles to your post.
Video: Must be uploaded on YouTube. Use the full youtube. com/watch?v= URL format.
Images: 3 or more, to best showcase your product and tell a story: 1270x760px <3MB.
Maker Comment: In 3-4 sentences, introduce yourself and the team, talk about the problems you’re solving, who the product is for, what’s the use case, and why you’re building it.
Launch Now/Schedule: If you’re fully ready to go live, you can publish right away (not recommended) with the “Launch Now” option. But if you need more time and editing, you can always choose the scheduling option and publish later. One last thing, the site operates in the PST time zone, so it will go live on the site according to PST.
We recommend paying attention to these steps and ticking all the boxes to higher your chances of succeeding on Product Hunt.
Consider these steps as a bare minimum for launching on Product Hunt. Now, let's proceed to the actual tips that will help you achieve success with your launch. And afterwards, we'll also consider some successful product launches from our Softr community (including Softr's own PH launch), which are good examples of applying these tips in real life.
Let's start!
Tip 1: Add a discount/special offer
As any community ever, the Product Hunt community also appreciates any discount and special offer you will be able to provide. We gave away a 30% 6 month discount on our launch day which resulted in more people being drawn to upvoting our product and getting familiar with it.
Tip 2: Schedule your launch
Well, this is one of the aspects you have to be careful with. The launch day is highly important and there are a few things you need to be smart about. The further the launching day, the wider the room for you to breathe, create a perfect post, and do any changes that come to mind.
If you have a solid community and supporters who will be able to support you and the launch is big and important, go for Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. These days are the busiest and Product Hunt has the most number of visitors. Hence, the competition is fierce and so is the probability of being recognized by more people and getting higher results.
Tip 3: Choose the 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 PST. If you want to be the #1 Product of the day, you should be hunted in the 2nd part of the day. If you want to be seen by as many people as possible, go for an early hunt. This of course is not 100% working since there are many factors to consider no matter the goal you have in mind.
The homepage resets every day at 12 am PST. So schedule your post right after 12 am PST. Not only will you have 24 hours of exposure but you will also be ahead of your game and competitors.
Tip 4: Find a hunter or hunt yourself
Product Hunts gives the option to hunt your product yourself or by reaching out to Hunters. If you want to go live quickly and have full control over your launch day, hunt your product yourself.
Launching with a Hunter is also a great choice, but it takes a lot of time and work. If you already know some of the Hunters and there would not be a need to spend hours uselessly cold mailing them to score one, go for it. Launching with a Hunter is better in terms of getting more recognition as they will most likely tweet about your launch. Their followers will also get notified when they hunt your product.
Our first launch was hunted by our founder and for a newbie, we had solid numbers, recognition, and a lot of talks around our product. For the second launch, we had KP hunt our product. KP is one of the most influential members of the no-code community and it made a significant difference with numbers.
Upvote Bell has a great directory where you can find all the information you need to choose the most ideal Hunter out of hundreds. Product Hunt hunters leaderboard collects and analyzes all the information about the Hunters. They also update the leaderboard every 24 hours to get you the freshest and most accurate information.
Tip 5: Ask for feedback
Asking for feedback from your community is one of the best options for higher upvotes and comments. Before the launching day, create a list of supporters, prepare a list of social posts and emails to send the day before the launch. But don’t overdo this, 2-3 posts about your launch on Twitter will make wonders. The same goes for emails you’re going to send. One would be far enough to let your community know what’s up. The best-case scenario is having a small group of people who use/used your product before launch. You can even curate a Slack channel or Facebook group to make the conversation personal.
Useful Tools
There are a few amazing tools we believe would be great to include in the launching process.
- Use Preview Hunt to preview and prepare your Product Hunt submissions.
- You can also track your launch on Product Wars 2.
That would be it. All you need to do to successfully launch on Product Hunt and reach some astonishing results. But, another thing you should do is avoid the following steps not to screw up your launch.
Tip 6: Don’t spam the hell out of hunters
Product Hunt is a pretty powerful platform with a strong community built all over the media. Scoring a well-known and amazing Hunter can impact your success significantly. But if you’re going to do it unnaturally and by spamming their socials and emails, you automatically make Hunters turn away from you. Product Hunt has repeatedly mentioned they value their community and will take any action they must to keep their Hunters and community spam-free.
Tip 7: If you can’t be your hunter's first product of the day, don’t even bother
When looking around the web for more tips for you, we stumbled across this Reddit post where people talked about how they ruined their chances of success by agreeing to be the second product their Hunter would “hunt” on the same day. This cut out the possibilities and advantages they got when launched with a Hunter. They ended up not getting into the featured listing by default which harmed their chances of gaining more visibility and users.
Tip 8: Don't focus too much on Product Hunt, work on your product
Product Hunt is a great platform to get press and new users, but you already know how fierce the competition is and success comes around for a small number of launches. Even if your launch is successful, you might stand in the way of getting more users out of the launch. The worst possible thing you can do is have an awesome launch for your product and leave it to that. There are hundreds of directories, which will help you find your potential customers. Not to mention, the constant work you have to put on your product to grow. If your app is poorly built with bad UI and doesn't provide real value to its potential users, no one is going to bother to browse your website for longer than two seconds no matter the number of upvotes/comments you get. So consider building an amazing product potential users will love and support for the longer run.
Tip 9: Avoid low-quality votes
Many launchers tend to ask their friends and family to help them out with upvoting. But here is the trick. When you ask them to sign up and upvote your product, they end up bringing low-quality votes. This is mostly because Product Hunt identifies them as bots when they sign up on the launch day and their only action is upvoting your product. You shouldn't ask directly to upvote your product. Just spread the word within your community and other communities and let the people decide for themselves. If you really have an awesome product, the votes will come naturally.
If you want to learn more about the do’s and don’ts of launching on Product Hunt, check out the SaaS school’s video on Product Hunt hacks.
Showtime: Made with Softr
There are a lot of great apps built with Softr. Some have already managed to get a lot of attention, especially on Product Hunt. The following are some of the most successful launches from our community.
LetterHunt (#1 Product of the week/day, 1628 upvotes)
10,000+ active, curated newsletters to promote your product
First on our list is LetterHunt. The curated newsletter has been around for only a few months, but it has already become a no-code community favorite and was the #1 Product of the week/day.
LetterHunt will help you unlock a new avenue for your product and help you connect with 10.000+ active and niche newsletters. Numbers speak volume, and this incredible product also managed to make 4k in revenue in just 2 months.
LetterHunt’s launch on Product Hunt showcases how one can achieve astonishing results by following a plan (steps mentioned above) and by creating a product that solves the problems of many users, including us at Softr. They even offered a 50% discount to Product Hunt community members.
AdSets (#1 Product of the day, 912 upvotes )
Browse active & high-performing ads of top companies
The next Product Hunt launch we’re going to cover is Adsets. Adsets is your go-to app for browsing active ads from top companies. The tool is perfect for getting insights on competitors and conducting more thorough research.
The app will be utterly useful if you struggle to find Ad inspiration. Adsets is free and the fun doesn’t stop here: you automatically get a list of the top 1000 articles on Facebook ads once you subscribe.
Adsets managed to get #1 Product of the day and #4 Product of the week on their launch day. They even got a Golden Kitty nomination.
Fun fact: Both LetterHunt and Adsets are passion projects by Akhil BVS. We recommend you check him out for more insights on how to become a Product Hunt community favorite.
Listr (#2 Product of the day, 483 Upvotes)
Explore the best of curated Twitter lists
Next up is Listr, a practical tool that helps you explore and get all the best out of Twitter lists. Twitter list is a curated group of accounts that gives you the ability to manage content in distinct groups.
There are 100+ useful and credible Twitter lists on the platform to help you find the one which is a good fit for the given purpose.
Listr became a Product Hunt community favorite and was the #2 Product of the day. Around a month ago we got the news from Sujeet, Listr’s founder, that Listr got acquired by Pony Express Studio, a France-based company building for the creator economy.
Bukable (#2 Product of the day, 236 upvotes )
A marketplace to hire verified students for various tasks
Bukable is a great platform that helps students find jobs that won’t interfere with their studies. Bukable works with highly skilled and talented verified students that will 100% commit to perfectly finishing the short-term tasks they’re assigned.
The free platform was the #2 Product of the day on September 19, 2021. Ever since Bukable has been getting more and more recognition and users helping them find work and freelancers with ease.
Softr (#1 Product of the year/week/day, 2011 upvotes)
Build web apps & portals from Airtable, no code required
We are not going to round up the article without mentioning Softr. We had two launches, Softr and Softr 2.0, on Product Hunt. Altogether we have 3700+ upvotes, 2 wins on the Golden Kitty award (No-code and Product of the year), 5000+ unique visitors, 1325+ sign-ups, and much much more. We have reached these results by following the steps mentioned in the article.
We are incredibly happy and thankful for the ProductHunt community using and sharing their love of Softr not only during the launch days but on daily basis.
But we can’t guarantee the results to be the same, worse or better. Remember, everything is highly individual and what worked for us may not work for you.
Perhaps that last and final step is don’t let your success or failure influence your expectations of the future. Mainly focus on building an amazing product, community and the result and success will come around with or without Product Hunt.
Honorable mentions
• MemeDB (350 upvotes)
• Landscape (317 upvotes)
• Promo Wizard (268 upvotes)
• Wish Wall (267 Upvotes)
• Microwonder (248 upvotes)
• Clarity (176 upvotes)
• Beyta (148 upvotes)
The art of launching on Product Hunt is a delicate one, but it’s one of the best ways to conceive, develop and launch your product. Hope this blog post sparked some new ideas for your Product Hunt launch and will shed some light on the path and help you reach faster results. Remember not to be discouraged and keep on going no matter what!
Frequently Asked Questions
Got a question? We've got answers.
Yes, Product Hunt is a free platform.
You can get your product promoted with Product Hunt’s Promoted Products paid feature. Your products will appear in the popular products category on the Product Hunt homepage and newsletter. These posts are annotated with a "Promoted" badge and are available to makers within the Product Hunt community.
Yes, you can find many product directories and similar platforms where you can post your website. Here you can find a few Product Hunt alternatives.
Golden Kitty Awards is an annual award ceremony organized by Product Hunt where the best products, makers & community members of various categories get nominated and win awards with public voting.
Yes. But there is a timing interval you should pay attention to. The time gap shouldn't be less than 6 months, however, it's best if you contact the PH team directly to agree on the dates.
About Softr
Softr is an easy-to-use no-code platform that turns Airtable bases into powerful web apps and client portals. Softr offers a way for you to authenticate your end-users, control access to your content and data based on conditional rules like roles, logged-in status, subscription plans etc. If you're using Airtable as a product catalog you can use a Softr template to build your e-commerce website. Or maybe you'd like to build a custom website for your travel journal, there's a template for that too!
