Product Hunt launch: our handbook

Have you ever checked Gitlab's handbook or Posthog's? They might be worth a few MBAs and are freely available.

While we don’t have a public handbook yet, we decided to share our Product Hunt internal guide.

Launched on April 4th 2023, Lago has been Product of the Day, of the Week and of the Month, and accumulated more than 1200 votes on Product Hunt.

It was actually our 1st launch, none of us on the team had experience with Product Hunt, so its success was NOT a given!

What have we learned from it and how can it help you launch as well?

TLDR - 9 serious things to know

1. Budget a month of preparation

Start preparing at least four weeks if it’s your first launch. Read best practices, find a hunter, create an account and be active, prepare the visual assets, wording and communication.

2. Define what ‘success’ is for your launch

Go beyond the ‘getting the maximum number of upvotes’ goal. Do you want to get sales leads? Candidates? With whom? Is the Product Hunt audience the right target? In our case we wanted to raise awareness about pricing and billing challenges among product managers, who are the typical audience of Product Hunt.

3. Create a teaser for your launch

Infos here. It’s a pretty new feature, it enables you to include the link in your website, social banners, and the latest newsletter. It notifies the subscribers when you launch! We had dozens of subscribers pre-launch.

4. The copy is key

On your launch page, the words ‘list’ or ‘guide’ will take you out of the front page pretty systematically. When posting on social media about your launch, only include one ‘call to action’ linking to your launch page. Concision, and precision. We reworked this at least 5 times.

5. Don’t spam

In your daily life, do cold, non personalized emails work? We’ve been receiving a lot of requests for upvotes from total strangers, we're sure you have too. These don’t work and frankly, it often feels a bit disrespectful of the recipients’ time. Rely on your existing community: Twitter or Linkedin followers, Stargazers, etc. Do the work of personalization, it compounds.

6. A day is 24 hours, and this applies to your launch day too.

It’s the ‘number of upvotes per hour’ that counts. Make sure to post and engage all day long, with different messages and contents. We scheduled posts to continue posting at night.

7. Comments are king

Product Hunt values interaction, so having people comment on threads is an absolute must. Answer questions, ask precisions, engage!

8. It takes a village

Tell the whole company early, keep them informed, and include them in the launch. We asked every team member to fill a list of friends or contacts that would resonate with the launch, so that we’d make sure to reach out. We asked our investors, family and friends to share. Don't they look awesome on this pic?!

9. Make it fun!

Launching can be pretty stressful but we loved drafting stories, defining different assets with our mascots, and asked our supporters to adopt a branded profile picture for the day, it ended up being noticed!

The no-BS 'Making of'

1. The quality of the upvotes counts

Product Hunt will recalibrate the ranking at the end of the day to remove the votes from accounts that were created just before the launch, or votes that are suspected of being from ‘bots’. In the example below, ‘Virtual Assistants by Remotebase’ (#4) has more upvotes than the #3 (Reap Pay).

2. We actually found the products that launched that day very very cool!

When seeing the ‘Virtual Assistant’ launch, our first reaction was ‘We want to try it, looks awesome!’.... Followed by ‘oh my god, we’re doomed!’. We managed to refrain from upvoting and reposting them. For Butternut AI, apparently, Anh-Tho (co-founder) couldn’t resist...!

3. 'Why Vegeta?'

A lot of people didn’t get why we ‘dressed up as Dragon Ball Z’. But we got reposted by Product Hunt themselves pre-launch, looks like a few ‘niche’ people understood us. 🫣

4. If you're not a new shiny AI tool, it's OK too!

We initially thought only productivity tools or AI tools made it to the top of Product Hunt, and that Mondays were bad for launches (we launched on Monday April 4th). We had no choice because a lot of other teams we knew about were launching on the following days that week, so we decided to go ALL IN anyway! Don't sell yourself short, we ended up ahead of productivity and AI tools that day, week and month!

5. Memes

Last but not least, this is the meme I sent to my friends on D-day, and… it worked! I’m joining Lago full time after summer! Thanks guys for all your support, once again, a meme can take you a long way.

Great reads we recommend

• Two useful tweets that gave us a lot of insights from Enzo Avigo (June) and Patricia Bernasconi (Kairn).
• 9 Tips for a successful launch from Gamma.
• Hexa's wrap up
• Ross Currie about 'asking for upvotes'
• Product Hunt about 'spam'](https://www.producthunt.com/stories/let-s-talk-about-spam)

Our ready-to-use template to prepare your launch

HERE it is