Launching a product on Product Hunt isn’t just a great way to promote your product and find new users. It is also a great tool for building a community around a brand, engaging customers and getting important feedback from them.
We spoke with three companies that have successfully launched on Product Hunt and asked them to share their thoughts and advice with the readers of the Crello blog.
Flawless App
Flawless App is a macOS tool that allows you to compare your conceived design with a real mobile app. The tool notices interface problems before you start losing money because of them.
Product Hunt Achievements
- “Product of the day”
- “Product of the week”
- Golden Kitty Award nominee
Product maker Liza Dziuba made the list of Maker of the Year (2017).
Preview (opens in a new tab)
Since 2017, the Flawless App team has come out to Product Hunt 9 times with key and additional products – Flawless App, Flawless Feedback, Reduce, Design Tools Weekly, Awesome Design Tools and others.
“Product Hunt is a friendly community with great products and strong teams that make those products. There you can ask, talk to great people, look for competitors, find alternative products, see the history of companies and their product launches, read interesting insights, take part in hackathons and meetups. The list is endless. At Flawless App, we love being part of the Product Hunt family, ”says Lisa.
Flawless App Launch Strategy on Product Hunt
- devote a week to preparing promotional materials, texts, visuals and general positioning on Product Hunt;
- after the start, share the news of the launch on social networks and the Flawless community.
Usually, everything related to the launch is handled by a marketing team of two people – Vali Gavrilyuk and Liza Dziuba.
What are the top three things to keep in mind when launching on Product Hunt?
Before you start preparing for a Product Hunt campaign, you need to understand:
1. How do our users spend their time on Product Hunt?
2. Is the product suitable to appear on the home page?
3. What are your goals for Product Hunt and how to achieve them?
Were there any mistakes in running your Product Hunt campaign? How can you avoid them?
1. Don’t aim to be # 1 of the day. Thinking only about how to get the most votes will ruin other metrics, undermine team motivation and become the # 1 spammer of the day.
2. Don’t try to outsmart the system. The Product Hunt rating has a very clever algorithm, and any attempts to cheat it will work against you.
3. Do not treat Product Hunt as a one-off project. This is a great community and it is very valuable to be a part of it.
Planning to launch other projects on Product Hunt?
Yes.
What’s the secret to a successful launch on Product Hunt?
¯ _ (ツ) _ / ¯
Spark
Product Hunt Achievements
- “Product of the day”
- # 2 “Product of the month”
- Golden Kitty Award nominee
How did you prepare for the launch at Product Hunt?
Two days, but we mainly used content created to support our global launch. The marketing department was responsible for the campaign on Product Hunt.
Have you asked friends and partners to vote for your product? Through what social networks and messengers did you contact them?
Yes, we asked for support on Spark’s social media pages, and our employees also wrote about this on their personal pages. We also reached out to our beta testers community and asked for support. And if a launch message appears in the product itself – laconic and unobtrusive – it certainly won’t be worse.
Top three things to keep in mind when launching on Product Hunt?
1. Do a blitzkrieg. If you miss a moment (even a couple of hours), it will be difficult to catch up.
2. Monitor global launches and events. If you are launching on the same day with the release of the Tesla Model or the start of the WWDC conference – well, good luck 🙂
3. Build the community in advance. If you start on Product Hunt, where you have already gathered “your” audience, you will automatically get early users and investors.
Planning to launch other projects on Product Hunt?
Yes.
What’s the secret to a successful launch on Product Hunt?
Before launching, gather a community of people who are already burning with your ideas. These must be those who have been waiting for Spark for Mac for over a year. In fact, we have built our Twitter account “around” them, we communicate with them and share insider news every day. It helped tremendously during the launch – people already felt like they were part of the family.
Quokka
Quokka 2.0 is a SaaS product that helps get your message across even to those who haven’t opened your email. And what is important – the tool complies with the standards for processing personal data, GDPR.
Product Hunt Achievements
Two launches on Product Hunt helped us get 3.5K new subscribers – we continue to get 25-50 every week.
Have you asked friends and partners to vote for your product? Through what social networks and messengers did you contact them?
We wrote only to our active users.
Top three things to keep in mind when launching on Product Hunt?
1. This is a community, not a marketplace – therefore, you first need to give a benefit (vote, comment, test new products).
2. Don’t force people to vote and support. This is the only way to understand the real reaction of the market.
3. Accept negative feedback and maintain dialogue. Ask your users to participate in the discussion.
What mistakes do companies make when launching on Product Hunt and how to avoid them?
You need to very carefully choose the time to launch.
Planning to launch other projects on Product Hunt?
Yes.
What’s the secret to a successful launch on Product Hunt?
We continue to invest in our community. We want to improve the product to show the world the best version of Quokka for today. And we will remove all barriers that prevent the community from using our product.
What’s the secret to a successful launch on Product Hunt?
This is not a source of free traffic – it is a base for creating a product community and an assistant in validating ideas.
We hope we were inspired! Go to the page with a selection of templates that Crello has made specifically for launching campaigns on Product Hunt. Choose the template you want, edit the design, add your own text – and in a couple of minutes the visuals for your campaign are ready!
Also, read about how Crello launched on Product Hunt.