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How does it look like launching on Product Hunt and ending up in 2nd position?

Luca MicheliNov 15, 2023
How does it look like launching on Product Hunt and ending up in 2nd position?
Contents

Launching on Product hunt is exciting, brings amazing results and you should do it too.

If you are not convinced yet, this article might help to clear your mind on how to do it successfully.

Midnight. It’s a normal ending business day if it wasn’t for our incredible launch on Product Hunt of our last feature. 

Checking the results of the launch and I’m astonished by the power of the Product Hunt community. 

Why?

200+ signups. Enterprises’ and investors’ interest. More traffic. SEO Benefits. General Hype.

It’s cool and brings so many results that we are including it as a recurring monthly marketing strategy of growth.

Product Hunt has been for three times a good place to launch a new product for us. But of course, you need to know how to do it.

Our first time was a failure with very few results and we were working on that product from a year.

Let me explain how we are leveraging the power behind Product Hunt so you can do it too for your SaaS product.

How? 

First of all, of course, you need a product.

But what is a product

A product can be a completely new working tool or just an upgrade of your existing software

Or in this case, even an eBook can be successfully placed on the Top #3 Products on Product Hunt.

We tried a brand new product and an upgrade of an existing one, and we did succeed more when it was just an extension of our product. 

What? 

Yes, you read it well. I was thinking that if you want to launch on PH you need to have a brand new product. 

But after watching what was going on with the charts, I’ve recognized a pattern of products that are not actually “products”.

First Launch: Live Chat

We launched our first product on PH, our Live Chat software, 3 years ago. This is the launch in numbers:

  • Tuesday, December 20th, 2016
  • 178 Upvotes
  • 4 reviews 5/5
  • 3 Comments
  • No ranked
  • 16 Signups

Noting exciting right? Right.

We were small, we didn’t know how to do it.

And we were in beta. 

In the meantime, a few months ago, we did have another launch: our Knowledge Base Platform

Second launch: Knowledgebase

We saw a lot more traction from this launch, and we discovered the method to launch.

  • Thursday, April 11th, 2019
  • 320 Upvotes
  • 18 reviews 4.5/5
  • 42 Comments
  • 5th Product of the day
  • 51 Signups

This is the traffic of the Knowledgebase software landing page compared to the same day of the previous week. 

It’s quite a good bump uh? 162% more traffic than usual.

And the traffic didn’t stop the day after.

I was so excited about that launch that I wrote an article on how we ended up in the TOP 5 Products and how you can do the same.

This time, I used the system described in the article, and it was even better.

Today the launch was quite different. 

First of all, we didn’t spend 1 year building the product to launch on PH. We spent 2 weeks improving an existing one. 

Third launch: Visual Funnel Builder

Before giving you the details, let’s see some numbers:

  • Wednesday, September 25th
  • 392 Upvotes
  • 13 Review 4.2/5
  • 37 comments
  • 2nd Product of the day
  • 248 Signups and counting

These are the visits for the Visual Funnel Builder landing page.

It’s just incredible. Isn’t it?

The results are not final because from the knowledge base launch we are still getting traffic and great leads after 5 months.

The keys of a successful launch on Product Hunt are:

  • Product Presentation
  • Strong Community
  • Clear Goal

Product Presentation is one of the most important key factors. I’ve described how to have a great product presentation in this article here. To accelerate this process, you can leverage artificial intelligence, for example, through an AI presentation creator, and create an eye-catching presentation.

You will need a strong community to have the initial traction to rump up the charts faster.

To do so, we have created a Customerly Founders Club Facebook Group where we share anticipations and collaborate with people to build the products.

Creating a Facebook Group is something I strongly suggest you do for your business.

Creating Hype

The first thing I did was create hype 3 days before the launch by creating an event in the group showing part of the product improvement.

We have got 96 participants for the webinar on Zoom.

First thing I did after publishing on Product Hunt was launch the news as a post on the Customerly Founders Club group:

1 hour later we were #5 with only this post on the group. 😎

The Live Presentation with our Webinar

4 hours later we started our live webinar with zoom (90 participants) and I shared the live on Facebook.

We have got 300 views in total and during the webinar, I specifically remarked our 3rd position on Product Hunt and asked politely to share their feedback on Product Hunt.

The Email Campaign

After the webinar, I sent an email campaign to all our users to share the launch on Product Hunt, explaining the new improvements.

These are the results of the campaign:

A lot of people shared their love for what we did, and this keeps us in the position till the end of the day.

The Subscription results

The number of signups that subscribed in these two days is incredible. More than 200 companies subscribed; who knows how many will come during the following months.

The hidden result

A complementary result is an impact on enterprises.

We are having enterprises working with Customerly to improve their customer service of course, but this kind of launch exposes our brand to even bigger ones.

We track with Albacross who is visiting our website and these are few names that landed on Customerly after the Top positioning on PH:

  • Spotify
  • Salesforce
  • Cloudflare
  • Semrush
  • Zoho
  • Adobe
  • Mcafee
  • Move
  • Adroll
  • Chase
  • WeWork
  • Youtube

This is a system you would use at your advantage.

We learned how to leverage the power of the Product Hunt community to impact the tech industry in a smart and lean way.

We are going to develop our products by thinking about micro launches to do on Product Hunt to have this traction every 1-2 months to increase drastically our brand recognition and positioning.

If you need any help with your launch I’ll be more than happy to help you personally. Just reach out through the live chat mentioning product hunt 🙂

Luca Micheli

Luca Micheli

CEO @ Customerly

Luca Micheli is a serial tech entrepreneur with one exited company and a passion for bootstrap digital projects. He's passionate about helping companies to succeed with marketing and business development tips.

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