Want the #1 product of the day? You're doing something wrong.
Ahmed Saleh
10 replies
Product Hunt offers you a great opportunity to put your product in front of thousands of users. This is a great way to see if you built "something people want". But launching on PH It's *not* a good marketing strategy.
If your goal is to get the #1 spot it's most likely for social proof, or to have an explosive growth of your users. I'd argue that you should not aim for either of these goals.
- Social proof is easier to acquire and has a stronger effect if your users love your product through reviews/testimonials on G2 and other review aggregators.
- Explosive growth is not acquired via PH but rather through repeatable, scalable marketing and growth strategies and word of mouth (believe it or not).
If you observe top PH launches for the past year, many of them went nowhere, and a few of them outright shut down.
So what should be a successful Product Hunt launch?
I think the best launch is a launch that results in you having at least 15 people that use your product and love it. These passionate users will fuel your future organic and strategic growth. Otherwise, PH may drive traffic to your site for a few days if you get the #1 spot, but it's going to go right back to where it was if you have low retention (which happens if you build something no one wants 😀).
Replies
Danish Jaffer@danishjaffer
It makes sense what you are saying. The product ranked top does get a benefit for lack of a better word bragging point that what we are doing has users or has potential. If a startup has users already, they have an edge because they already have an audience on their social platform.
However, this does not mean the products that do not make it to the top are not good. I have seen many that are now great startups. I recently launched it and the product got nowhere in the top 10.
I will end it with few questions: When is the right time to launch on Product Hunt? How many upvoters convert to users?
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@danishjaffer Interesting take Danish. My personal experience has been quite different. If you want #1, you'll spend time & energy and exhaust some bridges to get there. Bragging rights are not worth that much. And if you already have many users, a PH launch won't do you much good :) . Think if Stripe launches their main payments API on PH, probably won't help them at all. It is most effective if you launch a good product, and launch it early. People discover it and you go from there. Use it as a stepping stone to show the community a hidden gem that will translate into many users (given that your main metrics are good -- retention and whatnot)
@ahmedsaleh yes. I concur with what you said. I am just saying that being top does have its benefit but yes solely relying on is not going to do wonders. Whether they get votes on merit or hacked the votes I will leave it to PH.
One should also not get discouraged if they do not make it top is not a signal of what they are doing is not worth it.
Great share!
100% agreed on this, Ahmed!
I'm working on a project that'll 100% not be #1 on Product Hunt but it's not even relevant to us. We're making a product so niche it's not relevant for the crowds - microservice management without specialists, wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand any of it but if you're interested it'd be very helpful to me if I can give a test on our problem statement - but it solves a very well defined audience's highly technical problem.
Why are we here on Product Hunt? You never know who you bump into. So we gotta be everywhere :)
@geri_mate @ahmedsaleh true, also fun products are on a significant rise. Memes, emojis are very popular.
Totally second it, 15 people who love your product may become the key opinion leader to help you build a strong community. Social proof matters, but faithful users matter much more!