Tuesday, January 11, 2022

After the ProductHunt Launch

What to do after launching on product hunt? 

This is what I looked for and figured that I was too late. And if you have launched the product without a lot of good preparation, you've missed the bus too. 

However, all is not lost and this post will still help you salvage the situation to some extent. Also, if you haven't yet - you're lucky. This is going to be a very powerful set of actions you can take immediately. 

CONTEXT

So our marketing team had a real good run with the listing sites like G2, Gartner, and the likes. And they thought they now know how things work. And hence one day I got to know that one of the noobs from the marketing team has hunted our product on ProductHunt. Facepalm! 

Despite our best efforts, we missed getting any meaningful ROI. However, every failure is learning. So, I picked up all the gyaan I could gather on the topic from successful Hunters and wrote a memo to my Marketing Team about what happened and what to expect now. I feel many other noobs could find this useful so I am reproducing it here. 

Here's the Memo: 

(Have removed some parts that don't make sense for a wider audience)  

Unlike listing and product review sites - PH is a LAUNCH platform. We chase a #1 Product of the day tag - and it's a 24-hour game. That's about it. If we get that badge we can use it for a long time. If we don't, we're done.  

We ended up being 12th on the day. The rating depends a lot on who's hunted the app and who is commenting on it. Upvotes also help - we did decent with the numbers, but we need more genuine upvotes, more meaningful conversation happening on the page, and finally more demo signups from the page. 

Next steps. 
This launch is done. Nothing more to do.

Next, we can launch new versions (after a few months), lateral products, and peripheral Products like (<some side product ideas, including case studies converted to ebooks etc> and all of them lead to the same landing page, etc. 

Here's what works better: 

1. Animated logo - gathers more attention. H/T @naz_09

2. Get hunted by one of the Top 10 hunters 

3. Prepare for launch - have a PH landing page that incentivizes upvotes (like a 30% off) for 3 months. 

4. Prepare for launch - have PH Launch e-mailer ready to be shared with existing and prospective clients so they can leave comments and hopefully upvote. 

5. Prepare for launch - Prepare employees to sign up on PH, and use it like they would use the platform. Instead of most people being new signups - only to gather upvotes. 

6. Prepare for launch - Keep social media and personal posts ready where we talk about PH launch on our social handles. 

7. Prepare for launch - identify top people in the category and reach out to them to check out the product and upvote/comment. 

8. We have to time the launch in a way that provides good overlap for both employees and clients. (6am EST is a good time) Also, doing it over the all-hands meet could be a good idea. We get 200+ live audiences on that.

9. And we have to ensure most people are not using office IP address, otherwise the traffic is probably discounted (no one outside PH knows what happens for real). 

More elaborate ideas on how to fill the form - https://medium.com/swlh/product-hunt-101-426511f03501 

HTH!

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If you found this helpful, do leave a comment for the Author. Otherwise, you'd never make it to the #1 spot. 

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