After preparing all of the above, the next step is the official launch. At this point, you face a choice of whether to publish the product directly as a Maker or to find a Hunter to help you publish the product. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages, let's analyze them in detail.
First, let's talk about finding the right Hunter to publish the product.
This can be traced back to when Product Hunt was first founded. At that time, there were few creators willing to share products. A group of enthusiasts who were keen on discovering new products took the initiative to share and explore various new products on it. Therefore, the role of Hunter was born. They played an important role in the early stages of Product Hunt and accumulated a large number of followers.
Finding a Hunter to help you publish the product, on the one hand, will push it to their followers, thereby further expanding the exposure of the product. On the other hand, Hunters in the same industry or field as your product can also serve as KOLs to endorse the credibility of the product.
Upvote Bell is a tool specifically for Product Hunt project management, and they also provide a list of Hunter information. Everyone can visit https://upvote-bell.com/leaderboard to find Hunters in the corresponding industry and view their past data information.
It should be noted that the official explicitly wrote in the guide that it is forbidden to find Hunters to publish products through paid methods.
Of course, over time, the number of users on Product Hunt has increased, and more and more Makers are willing to proactively release their own products. Therefore, if you can't find a suitable Hunter at the moment, you can also release products as a Maker, which is also recommended in the Product Hunt official guide.
According to official data, currently 79% of the featured posts and 60% of the daily champion products are all released by Makers (product developers) themselves. According to information from Product Hunt internal staff, the rules for pushing products to their followers after Hunters and Makers release products are different. If a product is released by a Hunter, only in-app notifications will be sent to his/her followers, but no emails will be sent. But if a product is released by a Maker, followers will receive both in-app notifications and email notifications.
Therefore, it's becoming increasingly important for Makers to attract attention and increase their influence in the Product Hunt community. This also echoes what was said at the beginning, when you decide to release a product on Product Hunt, try to get all team members to register accounts as early as possible, and start actively participating in activities on the Product Hunt community, becoming an influential part of the community.
Next, we need to select the optimal time to release, because Product Hunt's ranking is updated daily. The higher the ranking, the more traffic you naturally get. And this ranking has a great correlation with the time of your release. Product Hunt refreshes every day at 12:01 AM PST (West Coast of the United States, pay attention to the time difference). Hence, from the perspective of the day, this is the best time to launch your product. It allows you to have a full 24-hour cycle to attract users, vote and comment on the product, and strive to enter the daily selection list.
Of course, the release time also depends on the region where your product users are located and different situations. From the perspective of the week, working days are the period with the most product releases and the largest traffic. Large companies often release new products during this time. The number of releases on weekends will be less, so for some small teams or personal products, it may be a good time. According to official data, the click-through rate of the product official website button released on weekends will be 15% higher than on working days.
The social media data analysis platform Popsters released a Product Hunt data analysis report in April. They collected and analyzed data from 32657 projects. The final result shows that the best time to release is from late Sunday night to 1 am. This can help the project have a better ranking. Wednesday, Thursday, and after 12 noon every day are not good times to release products.
In addition, Popsters also analyzed the correlation impact between different tags, whether there are videos, and the number of approvals in this report. Interested friends can visit to obtain.
Once the release time is determined, we can officially start releasing the product. After releasing the product, what should we do to ensure we get a good ranking? Product Hunt's official statement is that it now fully uses an algorithm for automatic ranking, which considers multiple variables:
1) Number of upvotes
Needless to say, the more the better. Product Hunt officially declares that all upvotes are equal, but one point to consider here is the activity level of the upvoters on Product Hunt itself. For example, the weights contributed by new users and old users are different, which is to prevent mass registration of new accounts to brush upvotes.
Generally speaking, Product Hunt measures the credibility of an account from three dimensions. The first is the time the account was created, the longer the account, the higher the weight; the second is the followers of the account, the more followers, the higher the weight; the third is a score named Karma.
This is an internal scoring mechanism of Product Hunt, which will give corresponding scores based on user participation and interaction, such as comments, upvotes, and release of new products, etc. This score will be displayed on the user's personal homepage, and different medal symbols will be displayed according to different score ranges. Between 100 and 500 is bronze, 500 to 1000 is silver, and over 1000 is gold.
2) Speed of Likes Increase
The preference is for a steady increase in the number of likes, rather than a sudden surge.
3) Comments
Comments are also a very important factor. According to the data, one comment is often equivalent to 40-50 likes. The follow-up comments and replies after a comment are also very important.
After the official product launch, you can track real-time metrics of your product through the official Launch Day dashboard, as shown in the figure below. It includes current rankings, upvotes, comments, and reviews. Additionally, you can obtain the official Product Hunt badge code here, which you can place on your product's official website to redirect traffic from the website to Product Hunt, thereby increasing your product's exposure and upvotes.
It is particularly emphasized here that many guides previously advised against directly linking to your product's launch page, as it was believed to impact the weight of votes. However, the official stance has debunked this claim and encourages everyone to directly link to the product's launch page.
The hour following the launch is referred to as the "golden hour." During this time, it is crucial to ensure that your ranking remains at the top position, as this will bring in significant organic user traffic. Many users on Product Hunt tend to only look at the first few products, and based on past experience, products ranked between 2nd and 5th place tend to maintain their positions throughout the day and continue to receive a large number of upvotes.
Of course, this premise assumes that your product indeed has its own differentiation and appeal, and being in a favorable position at the start can help you gain more exposure and upvotes. Therefore, immediately after the Product Hunt launch, share it through various channels.
1) Email
This is where the previously prepared Mailing List comes in handy. After the launch, send information to potential users, inviting them to comment on your product. Many guides, including the Product Hunt official guidelines, specifically mention that
you should not directly ask others to upvote your product, but rather encourage feedback through comments. This is a good method that aligns with the Integrity guidelines, as comments play a crucial role in Product Hunt's featured algorithm.
Below is an example of an email sent on the release day of the product SavvyCal:
2) Community
It's worth mentioning that a more precise and efficient method than sending emails is through community platforms such as Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram. Mass messaging within these communities and potential user groups can result in higher engagement and open rates.Existing data indicates that community engagement and open rates are 8 times and 3 times higher, respectively, than those of emails. Therefore, during the alpha testing phase, it's important to establish a user community for the product and accumulate a group of loyal early adopters.
3) Social Media
On the other hand, social media is also an excellent channel for exposure. Leveraging relevant Product Hunt groups on existing social media platforms can attract more Product Hunt users to pay attention to your product. For example, there are many relevant groups on Facebook, Slack, Indie Hacker, and Reddit.
Additionally, Twitter and LinkedIn are great traffic channels. The following is a typical tweet example from the founder of Threado after the product's release, containing a brief product introduction, the product's link on Product Hunt, an interesting image, and mentions of the product's account, the team's account, and the official Product Hunt account.
Also, remember to include some keywords, such as: #buildinpublic, which can attract enthusiastic independent developers. Additionally, use #Producthunt and #aitools, among others.
Once a large number of users begin commenting, Product Hunt will mark these comments as unanswered in the dashboard. Your task at this point is to reply to these comments and answer users' questions as much as possible, expressing gratitude for their trial and approval, as well as for their criticism and suggestions.
This can help you establish a positive image and is also an important variable factor for the algorithm's automatic ranking.
One important point to note here is to avoid artificially encouraging a large number of new Product Hunt users to leave comments. New users are indicated by a red badge next to their names. If there is a significant amount of behavior resembling new users leaving comments, it may trigger the anti-cheating algorithm, resulting in the opposite effect.
Another interesting approach is to incorporate your product itself into the responses. For example, the founder of Loom uses links to videos recorded with Loom to reply to user comments. This not only impresses users but also further promotes the product.
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