All you need to know for prepping your Product Hunt Launch

Is my product good enough to be on Product Hunt?If you care about learning fast on whether a product or idea might work for a set of people: the answer is almost always yes (given that your target audience is present). Carefully track for whom the solution works and for whom it doesn’t though, so you’ll learn more about your exacttarget user.

If you’re looking for traction/customers; you obviously increase your odds of success by validating parts of your business upfront (e.g. do cold outreach to your assumed target audience and see whether the problem/solution resonates. Let them use it. See if they convert/keep using it. You know the drill.).

A few things to keep in mind regarding the product you’ll launch:

Does it matter who’s ‘hunting’ my product?Kind of. Product Hunt seems to take a lot of things into account when ranking products. The advantage of an influential Product Hunt user hunting your product is that all of his/her followers will get a notification on the platform. This will provide you with more exposure.

In some articles it’s also said that when influential hunters hunt your product, they end up on the front page of Product Hunt straight away (which is crucial, because no presence on the homepage = no upvotes = no eyeballs = no signups = nothing to learn from). I’m unsure on whether that’s actually true…

How do I find my Hunter?Use this list (top 500 hunters) to find a top 5 to reach out to. Don’t spam them with a vanilla message. Make it personal and follow up a few times if they don’t respond (they probably have a lot of other things on their plate). If Chris Messina is a match for you: ask him to hunt you right here.

💡Tip: use a tool like Hubspot or anything else that allows you to use e-mail templates and sequences, so follow-ups can be scheduled and will go out automatically (there are also a bunch of Chrome extensions that let you that with Gmail).

When do I contact these potential hunters?Get in touch with a few hunters at least 1 month before you’re planning to launch to gauge interest. If they agree, follow up two weeks before your launch with the necessary info. Confirm whether they’ve scheduled your product a few days before.

What do I need for the Product Hunt post itself?This (use it as a template, if you like). You can share something like that with your hunter as well. Use something like Dropbox Paper / Google Docs to share the post details (like the example) and add a link to a Dropbox / Google Drive folder for your assets. It’ll allow you to tweak things later on without the hassle of sending your hunter new assets/info.

You’ll find some additional tips within the template that I linked up as well.

Do I need an audience before my launch?I suggest you do. The main reason(s):

How do I build an audience before my launch?This can be a post all by itself. We mostly did cold outreach and a bunch of surveys to learn about our problem space and then re-connect to test (parts of) a solution(s). This allowed us to build up a first user/customer-base, learn things (what works/doesn’t work), and have an audience to reach out to for our launch.

It basically comes down to evaluating all the possible channels that you’d use to build a more sustainable customer acquisition strategy for your business anyway. Use Julian Shapiro’s guide on evaluating these channels (based on your type of business/product), it’s amazing.

What channels and means can I use to promote my Product Hunt post on launch day?

A lot. Make sure you prep and pre-schedule most of it upfront (and add the exact Product Hunt post URL to it on launch day), and/or create a promo schedule for things you have to do on the day itself.

Source: Hackernoon.com

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