How to launch on Product Hunt
Most Product Hunt launches are lost in the week before they happen. Here is what to prepare, and what to do on the day itself.
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- SpacerrApps
- Published
- Reading time
- 4 min read
A Product Hunt launch is still the single biggest day a small product can have. It is also the one most founders get one shot at, because a relaunch of the same page never performs like the first.
Almost all of the outcome is decided before the day starts.
Two weeks out: the assets
Product Hunt shows your product as a thumbnail, a name and a tagline in a list of sixty. Those three things decide whether anybody clicks, and nothing you do on the day changes them.
- Thumbnail. 240 by 240, and it has to read at that size. Not a screenshot of a dashboard. Your icon on a flat ground, or one recognisable object.
- Tagline, 60 characters. What it does, for whom. Read it aloud to somebody who has not seen the product. If they ask what it is, rewrite it.
- Gallery, 3 to 6 images. The first one is the hero and it should show the product doing the one thing it is for. An empty state as image one costs you the click.
- A 30 to 60 second video, optional and worth it. Screen recording, no music, no logo animation.
The full field list every platform asks for is in the directory submission checklist, and most of it is the same set.
One week out: pick the day
Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Monday is crowded with things that were held over the weekend and Friday dies by lunchtime.
Check the calendar for a large public holiday in the United States, and check whether anybody well-known has announced a launch that week. Being the second best thing on a big day beats being the best thing on a dead one, but being fifteenth on a huge day beats neither.
The clock is what actually matters: the day starts at 00:01 Pacific and the ranking runs on velocity. A product posted at midday Pacific has lost half its window.
The day before: write the first comment
This is the highest-return thing in this whole guide, and it takes twenty minutes.
The first comment is the only body text on your launch page. Without it the page is a tagline and a gallery, and there is nothing for anybody to react to. Write it before you post so you can paste it in the same minute the page goes live.
What goes in it, in this order:
- What the product does, in one sentence, in plain language.
- Why you built it. One honest paragraph. What annoyed you enough to spend months on it.
- What it costs, stated as a number, including what is free.
- What it does not do yet, and what you are working on next.
- One question for the reader, so a comment thread has somewhere to go.
Point four is counterintuitive and it works. Naming a limitation before anybody else does makes everything else you said more believable.
Launch day
| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 00:01 PT | Post, then paste the first comment |
| First hour | Message people individually, never in bulk |
| All day | Reply to every comment within the hour |
| Evening | Post the update, whatever the position |
Do not ask for upvotes. Not in a tweet, not in a Slack, not in an email, not with a link that goes straight to the vote. Product Hunt detects coordinated voting and the whole launch gets discounted. Telling people you launched and linking to the page is fine. Telling them to upvote is the thing that is not.
Reply to everything. The comment count is visible and a page with twenty real replies from the maker reads differently to one with three. It also keeps you at the top of the discussion feed.
The day after
The traffic stops almost exactly at midnight Pacific, and this is where most founders stop too.
Two things are worth doing in the following week. Write up what actually happened, with the numbers, and post it where founders read: that outperforms the launch itself for some products. And get the listings that keep working after the spike, which is the whole of where to launch your app.
If it goes flat
It happens, and it is usually one of four things: the tagline did not say what the product was, the thumbnail did not read at 240px, there was no first comment, or it went up at the wrong hour.
Do not relaunch the same page. Fix the thing that failed and launch somewhere else instead. There are nine rooms worth trying in Product Hunt alternatives.
The page that is still there in a year
A Product Hunt page ranks for your product's name and very little else, and the traffic ends when the day does. Everything else you set up that week is what is still sending visitors next year.
Submit your app here and it gets a directory page and a full write-up, both free, both permanent, with a person reading it before it goes live.