Product Hunt Tips: How to Successfully Launch on Product Hunt

Hello. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Ask KP Show. Excited to, you know, get this running. But today's topic that I'm super excited to dive deep into, if there's relevant questions, is on Product Hunt, you know, launching on Product Hunt. What are some tips and strategies that I have? I've, I think I've had maybe like close to 25 launches in the last year and a half. Many of them went on to become featured products, top 3, top 1. One of them was a product of the year last year. It's called Softr. So I've, you know, of course I've had a fair share of these launches and experiences and, you know, playbooks that I'm happy to talk about and share in public. Hey David, how are you?

Hey KP, I'm well, and yourself?

Doing great, couldn't be better.

I have a question about launching on Product Hunt.

Absolutely.

So what would you say are the main risk factors? Like, what would you be wary of, or are there any things that people should, you know, maybe postpone or consider as a downside? Because it seems like, okay, you're launching a product, you want to launch on Product Hunt, it's Supportive community, great, let's go do it. But what are the stumbling blocks?

Yeah, um, I think, you know, I mean, I'm very biased towards launching in public and, you know, making sure, um, all of the iterations and all of the, uh, improvements you make on your product, um, be as public and as community-centric as possible. So I'm gonna lean in by default and say, regardless of what happens, regardless of the downsides, the upsides disproportionately outweigh the downsides. But there are a few. I mean, the risks that come to mind are, especially when you have a sort of a product that's not ready for a vast set of use cases, you may end up gathering a lot of interest from use cases that you haven't prioritized. And so you're probably going to get a lot of comments and like, you know, demands and requests or whatever from the 3 or 4 use cases or edge cases that you may have intentionally chosen to not prioritize. So I think it's still good to know that there's some demand there, there's some signal there. The other thing is, of course, this is a good problem to have. You can have your site come down or you can have your API limits hit because you had so much traffic coming in from product time. But that's a good problem to have in my view. I've had a couple crashes on the launch day because there was so much traffic. And I always would take that because we were in real life fixing that and got back online within an hour, as opposed to so many of my other launches, which only had like 10 upvotes. So I'd rather have—

That is a good problem, right?

It's a good problem to have, right? Yeah. I mean, those are some things. I think just, it's not so much a risk, but just overall a mindset to embrace is to be super prepared for that day being your launch day and like being intentional and present for that 24-hour window. You don't have to be really present in the nights, but as much as you can, not have any other meetings and really bring yourself and your team to answer questions, to engage with the comments on your launch page. And I think these are some of the things that people overlook because they think it's just launch and go away.

Quick question that I'll take offline as my time winds down, but how does—

We'll bring you back into the queue though.

Comments over time, like you say 24 hours and then with time zones is my question.

Yeah, yeah, we'll get you back and Um, that's the question. All right,

yeah, I came back. I saw Suzanne in the queue a moment ago. I don't want to, you know, take her opportunity here, so— oh, happy to take it off.

Oh, okay. All right, well, um, Suzanne, can you— do you mind joining the queue again, um, while I finish this answer? Um, David, so your thought was— sorry, your question was around time zones,

right? So, well, I was wondering, like, you know, is, is there— since you've done it so many times, do you see feedback consistently over the 24 hours? Is it weighted in Europe, US, Asia? What do you see there as far as coverage that one would wanna have?

Yeah, they operate off of PST, the Pacific time zone, California, 'cause I think Ryan Hoover was in San Francisco when he started this. So there was a, by default, that was the time that was chosen, time zone chosen. So the one tip that I have, which was not obvious to me when I started, was I would wake up and launch in my EST 8 or 9:00 AM, you know, EST, which would be 5 or 6:00 AM, you know, PST. But I didn't know that you could actually launch at 12:01, you know, like in the night.

Yes.

When the day begins, you know, at the beginning of the day and give yourself 5, 6 hours of head start. to be upvoted and ranked up and down in the rankings. I did not know that until like, I don't know, 10 launches in. And I noticed that a lot of people were doing this at 12:01. And I was like, wow. And if you follow the official guidelines, which I— it was somewhere buried in some of the footlines, but they do advocate for launching at the minute of PSC. So you give yourself 23 hours, 40, 59 minutes.

That's a good tip.

Yeah.

All right, let's get—

sweet. All right, I'll, I'll pass you. All right.

Okay.

Hello. Hey, Suzanne.

Hi. Good, thank you. Uh, so my question is about what do you recommend doing before you go to launch on, on, uh, Product Hunt? So what's the lead-up to the launch? The launch?

Yeah, great question. I think first that question itself is important and even like to consider that there is a lead-up, you know, a lot of folks just go straight to Product Hunt, you know, and I definitely don't recommend that unless it's like a pet project and you don't care about the outcome, that's fine. Right. The lead-up is I have explored and experimented with like a staggered approach. So what I typically have done is I would first announce my project or product or experiments to 5 or 6 people in my mastermind group. These are people who care about you, who you have really deep social capital with, like reputation or like connections with. And they are all, you know, hopefully they understand what you're building. They're like part of your ideal customer persona, right? You don't want to, even if you talked about, what you're building to your best friend. Sometimes you don't, that person may not be the right person for this thing. So ideally 5 to 6 people, what I would call peer group. From there, you get their feedback. You catch the basic errors, you catch the basic copy mistakes, catch the basic, I don't understand the value prop, you know, kind of thing from them.

Mm-hmm.

And from there, the second iteration goes to me, goes to my Slack groups. Like I'm part of, you know, at least I don't know, 6 or 7 of them. With the one group where you have other product enthusiasts, hopefully be 100, 200 people. That's like an ideal size in a channel or in a public group. That's where I would do a soft launch. I would say, hey, look, I'm going to Product Hunt on next Monday. Would love your feedback. Love you to get me some support and some, you know, catch some errors or whatever. And then typically the third step would be my Twitter audience. This is when, this is during the days when I had like a 4,000, 5,000 audience. Now I have 35,000. So I'm like, sometimes I hesitate to launch to my Twitter, but I think it's still a good bet because your Twitter, your social circles are still only the folks who know you. And they're not absolute complete strangers like Product Hunt. So I would launch there and then I would have a mini announcement saying, I'm going live next Monday. Would love your feedback, thoughts, and blah, blah, blah. So by the time I go to product hunt typically, which is the 4th iteration, it will look polished and refined. And sometimes some people look at it and they're like, wow, this looks so great. Of course it looks great because I had 4 iterations with it. So that's the secret. And I always, I always suggest and recommend the, uh, stared approach, staggered approach, as opposed to going straight to the edge.

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. I think it also gives those people who might come and give you a comment,

Oh, sorry, we lost your thought. But if you want to join the queue again, Suzanne, we can finish that and any other question you may have. Yeah, welcome back.

I think it also gives people in that original group groups that you described time also to possibly sign up for product time.

Yeah,

I know. Just did a launch on Product Hunt and I went to click on it to support you and I was like, oh, I'm not set up over there.

Yeah.

You know, and I was like, oh, I'm going to do that now.

So to me, it's kind of like you're bringing your own party to, you know, like it's like bringing your own entourage to a, to a public forum. Right. And so, I mean, it's so important to have realistic expectations at these early stages, you know, early groups where Among my 5 or 6 peers, maybe 3 of them will be super hyped about what I'm building. 3 of them will be like, meh, but that 3 is huge. And then you got the second group of Slack folks, you know, maybe like I got 10 there. I got 13 so far. Then you got my Twitter or your public Twitter or whatever. You got like, I don't know, 50 people there, you know, or maybe even 40. Together you have about 30 to 40 to 50 folks on the launch day who are going to not only upvote, but leave you a comment.

Yeah.

With some meaningful, thoughtful feedback or praise or a question.

Yeah.

And this is the secret that a lot of people don't understand that, you know, everybody who's crushing it on Product Hunt's homepage right now has this entourage that you haven't seen them. So that's why you're like, wow, this is like, you know, blowing up on top 3 or top 5. And that's because they have done the work pre-lead, the lead-up work. And, uh, they've brought the rally, you know, to the public forum. So,

um,

yes, that's one other thing that I learned. Um, but yeah, sorry. Uh, do you have a product hunt, you know, in mind? Um, you have, uh—

Um, we're pro— we're— well, I'm like paying attention to this one because you're doing it. And 2, um, because I'm thinking months down the line, we're at the very, very beginning stage of thinking of a build in public. Marketing, we're a couple years into thinking about the concept and we're a couple months into exploring this specific app. So we're still in the validation stage, but it's when I'm starting to think about, okay, we've got to do some build-in-public stuff. I don't really know a lot about it, which is why I found you and have been following. And then even though we're not at a stage that we'd be ready for Product Hunt yet, I'm thinking about that and being like, what are the steps that we have to do prior to that? Right. And prior even to the steps before we stagger, what are the ones that are before that? So that we can get going on them.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, um, no, I'm, I'm glad you're thinking about all this, you know, a bit ahead of time. Um, where are you calling in from? I know we got a nice—

Victoria, uh, BC, Canada, just close to Vancouver.

Yeah, yeah, cool.

It's awesome. Thanks.

Awesome. Thank you so much, and great seeing you today.

Yeah, thanks.

All right, that was a great question. Um, Another tip that comes to mind on this topic of Product Hunt is, you know, this probably is obvious to a lot of people, but it wasn't to me in the early days, is I didn't understand the value of questions on the launch page. So I was only looking for praise because, you know, praise feels good. It boosts your ego. For example, I launched, I don't know, something like Kappa, one of my projects, let's say. Early days, this is also part of my lack of a mature perspective. Maybe I was not transformed enough at the time that I was looking for praise, looking for people to give me compliments and compliments and compliments saying, yeah, great stuff, blah, blah, blah, under the launch and in comments. And I've had a significant shift in my mindset since then personally, but also from a business perspective. Because really personally, I don't care about the praise that much because I think internally I have my own sort of understanding of how far we are, how good is this, what else do we need to do. I look for one or two meaningful compliments here and there, but I'm not looking for an overpouring compliment parade, because that's not the point. The point is to discover what are some prompts, some interesting angles, interesting twists, interesting use cases that you haven't seen, you haven't thought about from the crowd. And so the business benefit of this is actually Product Hunt prioritizes and the algorithm favors if there's more Q&A style question and answer, question and answer under under the launch, as opposed to just a blanket of, yeah, great job, rocks, you know, this is awesome, this sucks, you know, maybe not that. But so I've realized that actually, and some of my recent launches I've noticed where there was a lot of Q&A back and forth have ranked higher compared to just like, you know, 20 positive compliments that didn't end with a question. So another tip that— so these days what I request or what I ask my audience is to not simply just say, Support us. I usually say, support us and leave a question if something comes to mind. You know, that little subtle change in CTA, call to action, can make a huge difference. So, and I try to practice this myself. Even this morning before I came on the show, there was one of my friends, Max Haning and Michael Novotny, had a launch on Product Hunt. And I went and supported them just to give an upvote. And, you know, in the comments section, Instead of just simply like back in the day, I used to say, great job, blah, blah, blah, and move on. But I did that, but I asked a question, a thoughtful question or something that I was curious about. Doesn't have to be like, you know, super scientific, but I think something on the lines of like they had a resource, crowdsourced resource that had, you know, so many no-code projects listed. So my question was a very simple, curious question on, What are your plans of extending the roadmap? Like, how do you plan to keep this list up to date? Is it going to be crowdsourcing or is it going to be manual? That's it. And that led to another comment from the makers. So, um, yeah, I think comments and questions are way more important than just upvotes alone.

Hey, KP.

Sean, I'm in the back.

I'm in the dark, man.

You're in the— yeah, you're definitely— is it that night? Is it that late in the night in South Africa?

No, it's just gone after 6 PM, but it is winter down here, so, you know, the sun is long gone. But hey, here's a quick question for you, just in terms of describing your business, you know, in the little summary and the description, you know, what, you know, how do— can people get it right? And what should we avoid to get it wrong? Because I feel like that little, you know, that description is pretty much your hook, right? Like that's something that's important. So, you know, what are some best practices in your opinion there?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think, I mean, the title is the title, right? If your project is called Weight Room, the title is the title, it's called Weight Room. But the subtitle and the description, which is the longer, You know, description. The subtitle is usually 60 characters, I think. So it's what you want, you know, it should be a showstopper as much as you can, right?

Yeah.

And it's the punchier, the better. And a lot of the times the hook is the subtitle. You know, the main title sometimes doesn't even matter. Like weight room could be called queue room or something, or weight queue.

Right.

That doesn't matter as much. What they're looking for is like, what is the hook, right? What is that subtitle, the 60-character thing? So I would actually workshop that if I were you, or if I was, you know, launching this multiple times. Right. And I've done that with founders where I was helping them with the hunting and some of the, you know, launches. We would workshop that hook multiple times, much more than, you know, other parts. Description though, description is, I mean, sorry, some good practice about the hook is make sure that it It invokes curiosity. Make sure that it is slightly novel and has a little edgy, you know, opening to it. And then— Any clickbait? Huh?

Any clickbait?

Yeah, clickbait. I think, you know, more tongue-in-cheek, right? Hopefully not like so boring clickbait, but more tongue-in-cheek is always fun.

You won't believe this product, right?

Yeah, you don't want to— You don't want to say stuff like, weight room, you're not ready for this, or something, you know, like, what the heck, you know? But you want it to be like a little tongue-in-cheek, like, I don't know, Quibi, but, you know, better or something. Like, I'm just kidding. I'm not knocking on Quibi because, you know, it was a disaster. But yeah, like you want it to be as playful as you can, if possible. We did the radio show. We did the Founder Hotline project launch last week. And the hook was like a retro radio style, a retro radio show you would wanna be part of or something like something on the lines. Right.

Okay.

So I know we're, yeah, almost outta time. Let me finish the thought there. So yeah, that's, I think that's key. The hook is very important. Description, I would try to make the description as matter of fact as possible. I think that your creativity should be more in the, Hook and description should be more of a logical justification of you know your creative hook, right? What does it do? Give me the TLDR. I think there's a 300 character limit there, so you have some space. But yeah, that's you know don't start again. Don't try to make make it so big either. You know just keep it short and punchy, and that's it. You know the rest can be part of the maker comment. or, um, you know, a Hunter comment. So yeah, I think, uh— oh, we have a special guest, Goku!

Hey KP, how's it going?

It's going so well, man. Good to see you. How are you? How's the baby?

Good to see you. Thank you. Sorry, I'm actually on a walk with the baby right now.

I'm assuming that baby Nick has a question for me for the Ask KP Show.

Yeah, exactly. So Nick wants to know, I've heard that there's different days of the week that are better or worse for launches and also the time of the launch, like 12:00 AM Pacific or something like that makes a difference, but it depends on the type of product. So wanted to know your thoughts around that.

Yeah. Great question. Thanks. First of all, thanks for joining the feed, joining the livestream. So let's tackle the first one first, which is the date or the day of the week. I agree. Anecdotally though, empirically, I don't really have like scientific data, but I think what I've noticed is Tuesdays and Thursdays have been performing better than other business days and definitely no weekends. You know, weekends, it's easy to rank in top 3 on the weekend, but you're only going to get 1/10 of the eyeballs. So you're probably going to get like I don't know, compared to a normal launch, you, you know, they have at least 1 or 2 million, you know, views each day, in my view, on an optimistic day. So on the weekend, you probably get like, I don't know, 10K or 20K, 30K. So very, very less in my view. So I wouldn't launch on the weekend unless it's like a fun set, right? Again, side project you don't care about, you just launch, that's fine. But empirically, Tuesdays and Thursdays have been better. In my view. I don't know why, I can't explain why. That's been my mantra. It does, again, it's not the end of the world if sometimes you can't find those 2 slots. I would still launch on Monday or Wednesday, it's fine. Maybe not on Friday. So that aside, the 12:01 PST is actually a real thing because everybody else will launch at 12:01. So if you're launching later than 12:01 PST, like 3:00 PM, sorry, 3:00 AM or 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM PST, It's just that you're going to be behind in the race. You may somehow still get ahead if your product's such a great thing, or if it appeals to the product enthusiasts that are on Product Hunt, you know, you may still make it. For example, I often see Stripe launch later in the day and they still make it because it's Stripe, right? So.

Okay. Awesome. That makes sense. Quick question. Was that— you mentioned the importance of a hunter. So I was wondering, what is the role of a hunter? Is it promoting it across different platforms? Or is there some sort of role that the hunter plays on the Product Hunt platform itself?

I think they should probably like not call it hunter anymore. Because, you know, like, back in the day, there were only a handful of hunters who would bring these launches and products to life on Product Hunt. Right. They were like the gatekeeper, like middlemen through which they were like the curators through which new products were launching on Product Hunt. But now anybody can be a hunter so that it doesn't have the value that it used to have back in the day. However, there's another piece that I think is valuable and maybe they should not call these hunters, but what the other piece is, in my view, is that folks who have a huge audience, folks who have a huge reputation, folks who have you know, huge networks and following off Product Hunt, you know, can help significantly, you know, on your launch on Product Hunt, right? So Patrick Collison, founder of Stripe, a few others like that, like Eric Ternberg, you know, founder of On Deck, a few others, they actually, you know, they have significant networks and connections in real world or online. They have, let's say Sahil Bloom has an impressive newsletter, huge newsletter, So, you know, when that person becomes or chooses to be a hunter, you of course have a massive advantage because inevitably that person is going to talk about this either on the podcast or they're going to talk about it on the newsletter saying that, hey, look, I am hunting, or I am launching, I'm helping Gokul's product launch today and check it out, right? That will go, that will have attract, that will attract more eyeballs than Some, uh, some nameless person hunting you, you know. So my, my suggestion is either go for an elite audience person, like someone who has a network, you know, someone who can like really amplify as much as you can, or hunt it yourself. Anywhere in the middle is pointless.

Got it.

Awesome. Thanks a lot, KP.

Awesome, man. Great, great seeing you. Great catching up.

Yeah, good to see you.

Enjoy the rest of your walk.

Thank you.

All right. See ya. Bye-bye. All right. The tactic around day is actually, the day of the week is actually unique as well. So I'm glad that Gokul brought it up. I'm trying to think of what else that I have learned recently about Product Hunt. We talked about the images, the gallery, the GIFs. I mean, there is a lot of folks I agree to in the sense that a lot of folks say that a GIF a logo that's part of a GIF. The thumbnail, if the thumbnail is a static image versus a GIF, it seems to make a difference. The community seems to prefer moving objects or moving, you know, logos or moving animations or whatever on the thumbnail, which I agree. I think if you can make a fun thumbnail that has a GIF in it, I think that's slightly better. But they're all like, we're talking about the 0.01% optimization. I think at the end of the day, if you have a great product and if you have your own entourage coming up and showing up and hyping you up and rallying around the product launch, those are the keys that will easily get you into the featured rankings. Along with, if you have a great hunter. I mean, there's a lot of, myths around the, you know, hunters, you know, should I have a hunter? Should I not have a hunter? I want to clear it off on air that factually and technically you do not need a hunter to hunt on Product Hunt. It is not what they advocate. If you go look at any of their new information, any of the new posts, you do not need a hunter to launch on Product Hunt. That's, that's an old school playbook. So you can like, Practically, I think I just saw this stat this morning. I think about 60% of all number 1 products of the day have been where the makers hunted them themselves. So, you know, you don't need a hunter. So don't make it a— don't use that as an excuse to not go live on Product Hunt. Having said that, having an experienced hunter or having someone who's a top hunter or someone who's done this many, many times is just a nice to have, to kind of ease your own stress, to ease your own anxiety on the launch day, and to guide you in the steps that need to happen before the launch, during the launch day, and post-launch. So it's just kind of like, you can climb Mount Everest solo or you can climb with a Sherpa, right? Like, there's no— it's not one thing's not better than the other. And absolutely, you do not need a Sherpa to climb Mount Everest, to climb a mountain, but I think it's just, it's just more of a way to like ease out your own anxiety if you're feeling super stressful, if you have a high-stakes launch, if you have a big VC, you know, level company and you're like, you know, you don't want to screw it up by making obvious preventable mistakes. And I think that's when you would probably, you know, want to have a hunter help you. That was awesome. Felt like time just flew. And I'm super honored for everybody who showed up and watched the feed. Thank you so much. And I'll see you guys on the next Ask KP show. See you all and have a great rest of the day. Bye.