Article from the founder of Rainex – Halyna Kamyshanska
6 weeks of preparing materials and contacts for the launch on Product Hunt, 1 day that flew by seamlessly and 1 sleepless night and a #2 place in products of the day!
There will be no idle talk in this article, but exclusively our startup experience, the result and our conclusions.
You will also find here templates of tables and documents that we used in our preparation. I don’t claim that my vision and our practices are the best, but just want to help those who are going through the same process as my team. If you’ve had a better experience, I’m truly happy for you and would love for you to share your comments and insights.
Now let’s get going!
Is it worth launching on PH?
The answer to this question depends on your launch goals. Do you want presentability and a world-renowned plaque? You have every chance of realizing that. But if your goal is lead generation, you may be sorely disappointed.
This is my first experience with PH in terms of having my product on the platform. There is an opinion that B2B products are more difficult to promote there, however, good and clear presentation, well-coordinated team work and corny luck influence the result much more than the specifics of the product.
It was an exciting experience for us, which, however, brought a lot of work and stress and did not bring comparable results in clients and money.
My bottom line for the future – if I have to choose between finding new clients or repeating the launch on PH, I will definitely choose to devote all these resources to customer acquisition.
Launch Preparation
We started our preparation 1.5 months before the launch. We started by creating a Project document where we gathered all the necessary information and developed a step-by-step process.
The document template is here. Perhaps it can help you to approach the preparation process in a more structured way.
Aim
In order to clearly understand the results, we want to achieve and to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of the launch, we analyzed and defined the project goals. This simple step helped us further fine-tune the process. While planning the tasks, we asked ourselves each time if these actions would lead us to our goal. This helped us weed out useless or redundant steps.
An example of our goals:
- Get 30 paying clients from PH in 1 month from launch date
- Increase brand awareness
Success criteria
For me, having clear and concrete criteria is the basis of any project. Otherwise, how can we assess whether we have achieved our goals or not? Criteria should be tangible and verifiable: figures, comparative indicators.
An example of our criteria:
- Top of the day – at least 3rd place
- Top of the week – top 10
- Top of the month – top 50
- 150+ product registrations
- 30+ new customers (made payment)
What we got in the end, I will cover at the end of the article.
References
One of the key points that influence the formation of the upcoming scope of work. Visual examples of successful launches relevant to your field and product give the team an idea of the promotional materials needed to prepare, founder comments, activities on the PH to pump up personal profiles and the product, etc. If time permits, find the founders of these products on Linkedin or Facebook and ask for a short interview about their launch.
There are a huge number of articles like ours on the Internet where people share their experiences. The various sources can give you a broad overview of your potential successes and help you avoid many mistakes.
Boosting team profiles
During the time leading up to the launch, your team should be building up their ratings: regularly upvote products and leave comments, subscribe to other PH users, attract subscribers for their accounts, i.e. interact with the platform in every possible way.
NOTE! I hope this is no news to you, but the PH operates a complex evaluation system, the details of the algorithms of which are known only to the platform itself. The option to create a dozen accounts and get ahead quickly is not going to work – Product Hunt strictly suppresses fake accounts. PH has a certain algorithm that prohibits logging in under different accounts from the same IP address or the same device. If you get caught cheating, both fake and real accounts can be blocked permanently.
If you need upvotes and comments to get off to a good start in the first hours of your launch, I suggest reaching out to your circle of friends and acquaintances. It’s much safer to annoy those around you a bit with requests for upvotes for a couple months than to risk getting staff directly involved in the launch blocked from the site.
Pumping up the founder profile
The founder profile is more valuable than employee profiles because the product page is inextricably linked to it.
- Don’t do anything that could be considered suspicious and could result in a blockage, including not giving your account details to employees to log in from another IP
- Atively work on improving your rating on a daily basis, which affects your credibility with other members and the platform itself.
To pump up my profile, I used to log in to PH every day, check for upcoming launches, subscribe to the founders and they would subscribe back, as every future upvote is extremely important to them. It was taking about 20 min a day. This way you get your profile on PH boosted and you get people who will be willing to help you on your launch day in exchange for help from you on their launch day.
NOTE! If you want multiple employees to be able to work with the product page on the PH to, for instance, track comments and respond to them on launch day, then you need to add them to the team list on the launch page. Below I’ll detail why this will be an advantage for you.
Pre-launch task list, deadlines and responsible parties
Be sure to create a list of tasks that need to be done to launch your product, assign responsibilities and deadlines. In the future, this will avoid all hands on deck and save you a lot of nerve cells.
To create the promotional material, we relied on references of similar products that were launched successfully by our standards. As the best practices method recommends to us all, we collected the best in our opinion, reworked it and created our own.
Example of our task table
Activity | Date | Responsible |
| Register and fill out team member profiles with the necessary information on Product Hunt (we recommend at least 3 people, I’ll explain why further). Don’t forget to leave links to your social networks! | Employee 1 Employee 2 Employee 3 | |
| Prepare visual materials for the launch page (reference links) | Employee 2 | |
| Prepare product video (reference links) | Employee 2 | |
| Prepare a product description | Employee 3 | |
| Prepare the first comment (from the CEO) | Employee 1 | |
| Prepare a special offer for the PH users (Annual subscription with a 30% discount) | Employee 3 | |
| Register Rainex as a product on PH | Employee 1 | |
| Create a promo page on the website for landing interested Product Hunters | Employee 2 | |
| Create Coming soon page | Employee 1 |
I would like to emphasize here that we indeed created the Coming Soon page, but we didn’t drive much traffic there. Frankly speaking, I didn’t quite understand how this page works, because I never received any notification about the launch of those I marked as Notify me. So I got the feeling that gathering subscribers there is a waste of time. Because on launch day, there’s no guarantee that they’ll remember you, stay in touch, and be able to support you. You end up wasting a lot of time trying to drive traffic there first, and then doing the same work again on launch day.
We went a little bit of a different way. We created a document where we added links to contacts of people whose products we supported during our preparation, those who also had launches planned and were willing to support us. So by launch time we had over 250 personal contacts with whom we already had an established connection. The document template is here.
Sources to build a contact list for future upvotes
- Product Hunt is our primary source. Check out the launches of the day and subscribe to the founders (while raising your ranking). By adding to them on their social networks and offering your support, you’ll gain a trusted contact. Don’t forget to add links to your document.
- Coming soon listings in Products. By typing the product name into the search box, in most cases you will find the founder’s page associated with it. Or you’ll see users with that status in comments and discussions. The path is the same: social networks and mutual support.
- Groups dedicated to supporting launches on the PH platform in Linkedin. You don’t even have to try, the launchers will find you. Here the interaction is always the same: you help me now and I will support you when you need it.
Although it seems like voluminous labor, if you distribute it properly, it takes no more than 30 min per person per day.
NOTE! Make sure there are no duplicate contacts. We had different people working with different sources and sometimes the contacts of those who are launching or planning to launch overlapped, especially in Linkedin groups.
Media Plan
In this task it is essential to outline not only where you will look for upvoters, but also how, who will do it and at what time.
Here is an example of our table with a marketing plan
Activity |
Date |
Responsible |
|
Create a list of active communities with Product Hunt members (FB, LI) |
Employee 3 |
|
|
Join LI and FB groups, according to the table. Distribute the groups among the team. It will be easier and faster to make posts at the moment of launch. |
Employee 1 Employee 2 Employee 3 |
|
|
Create 3 versions of publications + illustrations for them. (number depending on employees, groups, etc. as you see fit). |
Employee 2 |
|
|
Prepare listings of current Rainex clients and loyal prospective clients for mailing on launch day. |
Employee 1 |
|
|
Prepare the text for email newsletters. |
Employee 2 |
|
|
Publish a post on LinkedIn and FaceBook about the upcoming launch. (all team members repost to their pages to increase reach) Share the Coming soon page in other social networks and communities. |
Employee 1 |
|
|
Prepare a topic for Discussion on PH to warm up the audience on launch day. |
Employee 3 |
|
|
Prepare message text for the contact list that was previously collected on the pre-launch |
Employee 3 |
|
|
Preparing 30 comments to send to those who are ready to support but don’t want to write a comment themselves.* |
Employee 2 |
* In preparation for the launch, we were asked by many people to support their product and write a comment. I’ll be honest, I didn’t have time or just didn’t want to spend time getting to know their product and writing a comment. So I especially noticed those who sent ready-made comments that you just had to post.
Is this cheating? Yes, it probably is. However, a soulless upvote with a thoughtless comment gets you up in the rankings at launch more strongly than a soulless upvote without a comment.
So you can throw rotten tomatoes at me, but we created some comments beforehand that helped us at launch to promote our product.
Launch
It is critical to have a clear division of responsibilities within the team with specific realistic deadlines for each task. By the time of launch, each team member knows their area of responsibility and is fully prepared to act. Timely responses to comments, communication on messengers, groups and social media need to be in place. We created a table where we clearly outlined everyone’s responsibilities.
The launch lasts 24 hours and you need to cover the activity of alternately waking up PX users in each of the time zones. A launch is a 24-hour job: replying to comments on the product page on the PH, sending and replying to messages in groups, replying to interested users by mail and online chat on the site. It is a coordinated work of the whole team.
Example table
Activity |
Time |
Responsible |
|
CEO’s first comment |
11.01 |
Employee 1 |
|
Post on Linkedin and Facebook to the product page |
11.10 |
Employee 2 |
|
Get upvotes and comments from the support team (see section Boosting team profiles) |
11.10 |
Employee 3 |
|
Repost the post to personal profiles on LI and FB |
11.15 |
All employees |
|
Create a Discussion from CEO |
11.30 |
Employee 1 |
|
Publishing posts in FB and LI groups |
12.30 |
Employee 2 |
|
Activate mailing to current customers about the product launch on PH |
12.30 |
Employee 3 |
|
Sending messages to the list of contacts collected at pre-startup |
12.30 |
All employees |
|
Responding to comments on the listing page on PH, working with assigned groups, online chat responses, product demos |
13.00 – 16.00 |
Employee 1 |
|
16.00 – 21.00 |
Employee 2 |
|
|
21-00 – .. |
Employee 3 |
Remember above we recommended adding at least 3 people to the team on Product Hunt? Team members on launch day have all the same rights as the founder. This will give you the ability to equally distribute user interaction tasks within the platform for 24 hours.
For example, we divided the night time for our time zones among ourselves into equal 3-hour shifts. This way we managed to promptly handle all comments on the product page, all registrations on the site, all online chats from the promo page and even hold a few demos.
Lifehack
Adding to groups in Linkedin eliminates the need to buy Premium. You can write private messages to group members directly from the group, bypassing Linkedin restrictions. This is especially effective when adding contacts, as your message goes from a request to a regular message when you connect.
However, be prepared that this option is not unlimited either. After sending several hundred!!! messages, Linkedin will show you a warning about unusual activity and ask you to stop copy-pasting. And at this point, I strongly suggest you stop sending messages and don’t even respond with a Thank You to those who have replied to you with support (just don’t review and do so in a couple days). Otherwise you may get banned and then long to prove that you are a human and not a robot.
You can do the same with FB groups: add to the PH support group, write private messages to the members and ask them to support your launch. There the restrictions on the number of messages are stricter, but you can find a lot of upvotes there as well.
I’ll note that not once have we ever gotten a negative reaction to a request to support us (even when the whole team accidentally wrote messages to the same people who are members of several communities).
Product Hunters is an amazingly responsive community where everyone understands what you’re going through and is willing to support you. All that is required of you here is to be just as responsive in a time of need for another person. It’s such an interesting closed world of mutual support and joint PR among products.
BUG
I don’t know how the PH algorithms work, but at the time of our launch, our product did not appear on the main page of PH. Thus, we were deprived of organic and SEO promotion from the site for a long period of time. Our profile did not appear even when typing our name in a search box. We could only give a direct link to the page in messages.
Our repeated appeals to tech support were ignored for about SIX hours. And when they finally woke up, the response was “oh, we’re sorry”. 6! hours and 0 explanations. Seriously, no clear answer as to why this happened we never received. Therefore, unfortunately, I can not give recommendations on how to avoid it.
We read that this is not an exceptional case and it is not clear whether it is deliberately done to promote some other product, or whether it is a bug of the site itself. Well, or we are not the lucky ones.
Results
Like I have previously mentioned, PH is not really about lead generation, it’s mostly about PR. It’s a lot of soulless upvotes, 95% of meaningless comments, incredible adrenaline and competitive spirit for 24 hours of work.
- What we achieved:
- 930 upvotes
- 310 comments (half of which were “Thank you”)
- 2nd place of the Day
- 8th place Product of the Week
- Mentioned in the PH newsletter
- Mentioned in the PH publication
- 15 registrations in the product
- 24 hours of frantic racing
- A sense of our own greatness and 24 hours of self-admiration
Here I’d like to add that our network of contacts in Linkedin has expanded considerably during this time and among them there are really useful acquaintances from related fields who have expertise and our potential clients. For example, we were able to have a small custdev on a tax feature under development at the time with a person who has been working in this field for many years. For such active and sometimes high-quality interaction I would like to express my special thanks to PH.
The launch results last forever, but we have noticed a strange thing that gradually the number of upvotes decreases by 1-2 per week.
Side benefits
It was a revelation to me that in addition to PR, you can get additional benefit from your new introductions. Every startup or even an established business constantly needs positive feedback to reinforce customer confidence. After launching and actively communicating with many business owners in terms of mutual support, we received a lot of offers to exchange positive reviews on well-known review sites to raise the rating of our products.
Cheating? Again, YES! But as they say, all means are good in competition. Of course, it can’t compare to the valuable feedback of a real user, which is not so important for presence in the media space, but first of all helps to improve your product, to pay attention to the weak points you might have missed and to the strong ones that need to be developed. However, you can’t say that these reviews are complete lies either, because (at least in our case) companies try to give an objective evaluation of each other, without forgetting the shortcomings. This method really helps to expand the representation of the company and the product on various platforms and perhaps thus incline a potential user to make a choice in your favor.
When asked to upvote my product, the people I talked to often asked me to subscribe to their personal or product page. In the moment, when every upvote is like a breath of air for you, you do these small return favors without even looking. So, this can be a good way to build up subscribers on product pages on social media: FB, LI, Youtube, etc. and make your communication productive for both parties. Yes, it might not be the target audience, but a product with 1000 subscribers looks more interesting than with 10. So why not?
So, what you can get in parallel:
- reviews on external platforms (feedback exchange)
- testimonials on the PH review page
- growth of subscribers on the product page (subscription exchange or for upvotes)
- personal acquaintances with other founders who, for instance, use your competitors’ products and are happy to share their experiences, what they lack there and what would be great to improve.
Share your experience!
If you’ve had experience launching on Product Hunt and you’ve picked out some other best practices and tips that have helped you get to the coveted top spots and attract new customers, share your knowledge in the comments. I’m sure those who are just launching will THANK YOU.
2 thoughts on “Product Hunt Launch Guide”
Great article! Thanks a lot for the examples.
About the comments being prepared in advance, it’s a common practice. Everyone wins as best they can, there is no judging the winners.
Thank you for your feedback! We hope our materials will help you achieve the top spots