From Idea to 'Product of the Month': Simo Lemhandez's Journey on Product Hunt

Hello everybody, welcome to today's event. My name is Emilia, I'm a content manager at Founder Institute, the world's biggest global accelerator for early-stage founders. Today we're going to talk about Product Hunt and we have invited a great expert who knows everything about it. His product has been in the list of best products on Product Hunt, and we all want to hear how he did that. But before that, please share with us where you're joining from in the chat. I am now in Spain, Alicante, and I'm curious to see where are you joining from. I see there are people from Paris, Bangalore, Hong Kong. It's amazing. So For us, it's morning. People in Asia, it's later in the day. Thank you all for joining, and feel free to jump after the event in the networking lounge and talk to each other. Also, our host and myself will be there. But before the networking, we start with a short presentation, around 20 minutes. And after the presentation, there will be a Q&A session, so please write down, collect all your questions and put them in this Q&A section on Airmeet so we can see them better. Also, use the emojis down here to express your emotions, to tell us what you find interesting. And also, we want to ask you before we start, one question about Product Hunt and your experience with it. I will post it on stage right now. Have you launched on Product Hunt before or are you planning to do it soon? Please vote. We have these three options: yes, I have launched; no; or I'm considering to do it soon. So as we can see, The majority are considering, probably that's the reason why you're here and you're interested in it. And we at Founder Institute are also really curious to hear about product launch, about product camp launching, but we're gonna let you know soon why. Okay, now It's time to invite our special guest for today. His name is Simón Lemandres and he's a co-founder at Folk. Simón, welcome!

Hello, Emilia, welcome and thanks for having me on stage.

The stage is all yours and see you in a bit.

Thank you. Welcome everyone and thanks a lot for being there. I'll start by a short, I'd say, introduction of myself and then happy to walk you through our main learnings after launching, I say, a few times on Product Hunt and getting successfully Product of the Month and listed among the top of the year. I'm Simo. I'm one of the co-founders of Folk. Folk is basically the new generation. CRM is among the largest software categories. You have like massive players like Salesforce or HubSpot that are doing, let's say, almost insolent revenue numbers, still growing at impressive rate. But at the same time, it's probably one of the categories with the lowest NPS. And so that's why we decided it was time to offer people a better tool to make the most out of one of their biggest assets, their relationship. A tool that's collaborative with great UX and UI that you can customize to your needs with templates. And that's simply connected in your ecosystem of communication sources in order to just let you better do your job with your relationships. I'll start sharing my screen and feel free to ask any question in the chat. We will be taking them at the end with Emilia. I'm just looking here to share a few learnings I would have loved to save you for launching on Product Hunt. You should be able in a second to view my screen. Screen. Should be available now. I'll be sharing a short presentation really light— the only tool you need to succeed in sales, recruiting, investing, fundraising, partnership, whatever it takes when it comes to centralizing all your relationships in one place. We've done multiple launches on Product Hunt, um, 3 basically, and in one of them we got more than 2,000 votes, for which we have been product of the month and listed among the product of the years. Let me share with you 5 main learnings from these Product Hunt launches. The first one is Product Hunt is basically a community play. You need to leverage as many people that are interested in your topic, that are invested in your company, or that can help you in any way. The first are your basic users. The users you have, you do have, are most of the time, I'd say, early adopters in the beginning, and they tend more and more then to become more traditional users. But they have, like I'd say, a really strong empathy for the problem you're trying to fix. And they will be able to share in really authentic ways what they do think about your product on the product and page. Even more through comments because we know that upvote matters, but comments do matter even more as they give a sense of authenticity and really qualify the way your product is solving pains for people. So that's the first thing. Second thing I'd say is like on top of users and investors, of user and beta tester, is investors. They tend to have like a large follower base, be it on LinkedIn or on Twitter. There are people that have, I'd say, aligned incentive with you. And so it matters a lot to leverage them in order to just make sure they will share the right info with their community. And just make the job easy for them, like share with them exactly what they need to share, the exact pictures, the pre-draft the post for them, but just make sure that they will end up posting. If you need to follow up with them once, twice, three times before they do it, just do it. Just make sure you can leverage your community properly. Third element is like other founders, be it like founders that you already know or even founders that already posted on Product Hunt because they will empathize with the fact that launching on Product Hunt is hard, it's a challenge, and so they will be most of the time willing to help you. Just make sure not to do it on the day of the launch and prepare them a few days or even a few weeks before because it helps create the relationship and not feel that you are there here only for like exploiting their work, their network. And also for founders, they are like busy people but willing to help. So just make sure that you can share whatever you can in order to make sure they like, they have the right data to share on LinkedIn, on Twitter, with their user base, with on their company Slack, and help you for the launch. And last is basically your general network from people on your social media as your social media followers, people of your team, the incubators you have been a part of, or whatever community you could leverage, your alumni for university, alumni from previous companies, just leverage your communities because that will help give a lot of echo to your launch. So that's the first learning. Basically, just make sure to map all your communities and to leverage them appropriately in order to give them more eco you can to your launch. Second learning is come prepared. Like a product launch usually takes a few weeks to prepare. And ideally, what we like to say at Falk is that you don't need to be thinking on D-Day. D-Day is meant basically just to deploy all the things that you have been working on for a few weeks, but without having to create anything on the day of the launch. All the assets, all the emails, all the social media posts, even the DMs to people that you wish to, say, leverage from the community, as we mentioned, needs to be prepared in advance. What we did at Folk is we simply had like a Kanban board of all the people that we wanted to reach out to. It was on Folk because it was easier for us to centralize it on a CRM. And whenever and everything was pre-drafted. So we just needed to click on buttons. Like, you don't need to think on the day. There are so much things to do that it will be like losing time to have to create things from scratch on the day of the launch. Just make sure that you just have to execute what you have all already prepared. That's the second thing. Come prepared. Think about all the different elements that you'll be leveraging during the launch. From the landing pages, the assets on the product and page, the videos on the product and page, the emails, the social media posts, the DMs, all needs to be prepared in advance. That really makes a difference on D-Day. Third thing, it's go the extra mile. Like I kept this, I say, very simple equation that a thousand votes are a thousand times one vote. Because basically, In order to go after each vote, you have to go take them, like hunt every vote, basically reach out to people that are in your DM, reach out to people that are in every Slack community you are part of in DMs, reach out to people that you are interacting with on Twitter, by DM, on LinkedIn, reach out to people that you have chatted with by email. Every single person that you know, you need to go convince them one by one that they just need to give you a vote. And to be honest, like convincing 1,000 people in a day isn't like a crazy thing. Even more if you're like a small team working on the subject and like that all the team moves in real commando mode, everyone in the same room, ideally, or on the same Zoom if you're remote, and just making sure to go hunt every bot one by one. Basically, it doesn't stop. At the moment where you share an email with all your users and a social media post, go one by one. Relationships are built one after the other and the upvotes also are won one after the other. So that's what makes the extra mile. And I do think that you need to keep the focus during the whole day and the day is long in order to win at the end of the day. So that's the third learning, I'd say. 4, I'd say build great assets. People, like, we know that the attention span of people is really short, and in order to keep their attention span, you need to do things that are, let's say, pleasant, that are delightful, that people will love. And so on every, let's say, interface user will have with your brand and your product on D-Day, what matters a lot is that you feel different from all the other products that are launching. Like you feel unique. Spend a lot of time on the landing page, on making sure it's really, I'd say, purpose-built for Product Hunt. One thing we did that was quite funny is that we put Product Hunt cats literally on our landing pages and that made Even the product and team, we share us on their social media, on their newsletter because they have never seen something like that. And we included the product and cuts in our first launch videos. So I invite you to have a look. You really see that it's really purpose-built and that we have gone the extra mile in the quality and the, I'd say, in the quality we have put in the assets. Same for the product and page. Needs to be super well told in the sense that people that don't know your product should be able to understand what the product is about in 10 seconds from viewing the video, viewing the images, and you have like 5 or 6 images that you can include in this product page, and the tagline. So the tagline needs to be super straight to the point so that anyone can understand it in seconds without having to read the full description. So yeah, these assets are— you have time to build them. So just make sure that you invest the right, I'd say, amount of energy and dedication in order to stand out from the crowd. And a good inspiration is go and see all the Product Hunt launches that have been successful from the videos, the taglines, and the assets that these launches have been have been building over the years. And last, I'd say learning, maybe the most important one and also the hardest one, is simply build a product people love. And that's probably the hardest thing to do, and it's easy to say, harder to do. But the learning from there is that you need to launch at the right time, the moment where you feel ready, the moment where your existing user base is already loving you. And this takes a lot of craft, a lot of dedication. But basically that's what will make the difference. If you have like really authentic, I'd say, comments on the product and page, even really authentic comments from users on their social media because they truly and truly love you. And yeah, I'd say that this is probably like the biggest learning. You need to find the right moment in order to launch at the moment where your product really feels like a really consistent experience, delightful one that people truly love. And so that's only a product that people already love that will be a massive hit on Product Hunt because people will love it even more. So yeah, I just wanted to share these 5 learnings. I kept it quite short, but Launching on Product Hunt is a really good experience in the sense that it creates momentum from the team. You all have— all the team is motivated toward one goal from the designer that needs to craft the experience and craft the assets, from the engineers that need to build and polish the product, from the marketers that needs to make sure that the world knows about the Product Hunt launch and about the product. Everyone will be at 100% the weeks before. It's a really good time and exciting moment for the team. And it's also a great opportunity to celebrate. So enjoy the preparation, enjoy the day, enjoy the weeks after. I truly recommend doing it now and then whenever you feel you are reaching an important milestone in your company or in your product journey. And yeah. Open to any question you might have. Open to any question you might have. I'll just stop sharing my screen now.

Thank you, this was very interesting. Thanks for sharing your learnings. This is from your personal experience, right?

What was Yeah, so the product that we launched on Product Hunt, as you know, was Folk. So the product I mentioned in the beginning. I'll be sharing my screen again to show you our Product Hunt page. It will be quite easy for you to understand if the Product Hunt page loads. Hop là! So as I mentioned, Folk is basically the next generation CRM. And we put a lot of, I'd say, effort and dedication into making sure this product is launched properly. And I invite you to have a look at our different launches, that there are basically 3 of them on our product landing page. And we have a lot of dedication into making sure the assets are like super polished and that everything is well understandable. But to make it simple, Folky is like one all-in-one CRM, one CRM where you can manage all your relationships from sales, recruiting, marketing, partnership, whatever.

Very nice. This page looks really neat and with a lot of media, so we have some questions related to that as well. I will start from the first one and to which I'll put it on Thanks.

Until how many users, testers, would you wait before sharing a product tent? Absolutely, it's a matter of like users or beta testers. It's mostly a matter of like product quality. Do your existing base of users already love the product? If they love it, it's probably time to launch a product tent in order to get more echo. And the goal of the product tent is actually to get more users and more beta testers. So that could be a way to to feed your product with more beta testers. But I'd say that the trigger for launching is rather the product quality than— and the love users are having for it rather than the number of users.

Okay, great. And is there a point when sharing is— on product hunt is too late?

Absolutely not. Like, Product Hunt is meant to be the place where you share your product when there is something new, basically, about this product. So it only needs— like, if the product is 3 years old but you are developing something absolutely new, there is no problem for that. For example, Notion, they have been sharing like the Notion AI on Product Hunt, and they are, they are like 10 years old as a product, but Notion AI is new, so they were able to share it on product end.

Thank you. So never too late. It all depends on your strategy. Uh, this is a question that I'm also very interested in: how many days it takes for the preparation of the launch? What do you recommend?

So, well, if you want to do things really well, it needs I'd say a lot of dedication. So I'd say 1 month in advance minimum, in order— because you have some assets that will take time to be designed, especially the video and the landing pages for the launch. And this making extra quality effort on these ones can make the difference. Okay, and what about if it's just another version of the same Even if it's another version of the same product, like, you need the, like, assets basically in order to launch it. So it takes, like, a few weeks in order to have, like, these assets super well, super polished, that can really make the difference.

Okay, and next question.

So this is a question that a lot of people are asking, like, do I need to find what people name a hunter? To be honest, there is no rule about that. If you have a hunter that you can leverage and that has a large following, let's use it basically. But it won't really affect the impact of your launch. And this data comes directly from the product teams that we have discussed with. What really matters is how you can echo your launch outside of the Product Hunt platform so that people can come and upvote, comment, leave reviews.

Do you personally work with a hunter or you launch your own product?

No, we launch it by our own. We launch it by our own and we could have looked for a hunter, but we just decided to like have this more authentic way of launching it. Like we are makers and we launch ourselves what we have done as makers.

And in case you would like to choose the hunter option, how do you select the hunter?

Well, it really needs to be like a hunter that match your product in terms of like what he has already hunted and that has like, let's say, an authentic, that's actually an authentic user of the product that truly love the product. Otherwise, it won't feel really genuine.

Great, okay, another interesting question.

Interesting one. So basically, I'd say that the product itself is a launch in itself. So you really need to dedicate your resources to the product itself. The launch on Hacker News is, I'd say, more variable because it's really hard to get in the first page, in the first page of Hacker News. And when it comes to Reddit, it's not really like launches on Reddit, it's more replying to some questions, it's more forum. So it would be quite different. So I'd say that each launch needs to be, its platform needs to be treated independently with a proper strategy. And Product Hunt deserves to, I'd say, allocate a full day to it.

So you don't have to do it all at the same day, at the same time?

What really matters is like what your product is about. Like Product Hunt are really product-oriented, they love new product interfaces. Hacker News are more techy, more geeky. So if, so all products won't be a good match. It really depends on like your product type.

All right, one more practical question: how many upvotes do you need to become Product of the Month?

There is no rules here basically because it's like, it's a the product with the most upvotes in this given month that will end up probably winning. But like a good rule of thumb is basically that you need to be above 2,000 upvotes.

Was your product the product of the month? Yes. Congratulations!

Thank you.

What results, sign-up, trials, conversions did you get from the product launch?

Well, it will really depend from one launch to another, but on our side, we got like thousands of sign-ups, which was like a quite, let's say, good result. But it will really depend from one launch to another.

Thanks. And when you launch, did you offer special discount for new users?

Yeah, this is something possible to do on the day of the launch in order to motivate them basically to give like a sense of momentum, a sense of sense of urgency for them to like create an account today. We did it once with like 3-month trial for becoming unproductive. You just need to find something that works well with your model, basically.

Hope that helps. Just a couple of more questions, they keep coming in. So this one is about working with an agency.

So I won't recommend this because the goal of the product launch is really to feel authentic, and you won't really get like all the benefits that it can create in terms of momentum if you don't do it yourself. And you will spend probably like you money in like a useless Wait, not recommending the agency.

Uh, okay, so let's put to one. Uh, someone was asking about the best community platform. And honestly, go ahead. Is it another alternative of Product Hunt?

Yeah, basically Product Hunt is the best platform to launch, so we recommend starting with that.

Awesome, yes, and our webinar is about Product Hunt. And one last one. Would you—

This, it really depends basically because like taking investors, it's like a company-wide strategy. So you can decide to be fully bootstrapped or not. A product launch doesn't require necessarily taking a lot of money because you can do everything yourself. And I'd say that it's even a way to create momentum in order to launch afterward with investors. So there is no rule, you just need to find the right strategy that works for you. But in general, in order to get investors, you need momentum, and Product Hunt can be a great way to create momentum.

Awesome. I think we have covered everything. Thank you for your time. And everyone, you are going to receive all the materials and the recording within 48 hours. And don't forget to follow Simon, his product launch product, and all his contacts will be in the email as well. Would you like to—

And as makers yourself, feel free to have a look at folk.app. You can just type folk.app on the web. User CRM and let me— feel free to let me know your thoughts. Always looking for product feedback. Thank you a lot, Emilia, for having me here. I really enjoyed it. It was really cool to share all this insight and reply to the questions. Thank you so much.

We are really happy to have you, and please feel free to join us at the next forum lounge. We're going to jump in the rooms the Airmeet tables in a minute. So everybody, we can talk there and please share your experience, your feedback, connect with each other. Don't forget to follow our next events and sign up for our newsletter for more updates. Thanks everybody and see you soon.

Ciao ciao!