Sharing your launch

Don’t wait until launch day to start building excitement around your launch. Here we’ll go through a few important rules to know about how to promote your launch and best practices for sharing before and on launch day.

This article covers:

Marketing strategiesPromoting your launchHow NOT to marketCommon Product Hunt pre-launch mistakes

Marketing strategies

We have a few best practices on what you should have ready for launch day.

Update your profile

The chances of people viewing your Product Hunt profile on the day you launch or the days and weeks after are much higher than usual. Take the opportunity to update your “About” section and make sure everything is polished and accurately showcases your experience, interests, goals, personal website, and social accounts. Growing followers will help you gain support for your upcoming launches!

Landing page

Consider creating a landing page on your website that drives people to download or use your product. Oftentimes this can be your homepage, however, sometimes such pages are cluttered with additional information and links that distract from your key launch goals. Your landing page on the other hand should be focused on the key values your product provides with one CTA that drives people to use your product.

Your landing page can even be specifically targeted to the Product Hunt community, especially if you’re offering a special discount.

Badges & Embeds

We also have several badges & embeds available to add your homepage, sitewide banner, or blog. You can find them by clicking the Embed link at the top right of your Launch Page.

These tools help:

• Drive traffic to your Launch Page

• Engage your current community in your launch

• Show off the success of your launch

• Help tell your story and give context in blogs and on media pages

Promotions and discounts

Many Product Hunt users love a good deal (duh). Feel free to include a special promotion or offer on a dedicated landing page. These special launch day offers can increase engagement, help capture people’s attention, and encourage people to try what you’re working on (e.g. 20% off for 6 months).

Promoting your launch

Pre-Promotion

Here are a few recommendations for promoting prior to your launch.

• Join Product Hunt early. Get to know the platform and the people here. Sure, some of us might be building bots, but Product Hunt is a community of real humans! You’ll soon be asking for feedback and support on your own launch, so try helping others first. Start by responding to Discussions or sharing valuable feedback. Make real connections. We require that users have been in the community for at least a week before they gain access to contribute a product, but it's best to think of that as the bare minimum. Healthy community is about authentic, human interaction that goes both ways. Product Hunt is no different.

• Tease your launch. The Coming Soon feed shows launches that have been scheduled up to 30 days in advance. You can also add a Coming Soon banner to your Product Hub once your launch is scheduled.

Make sure that your community is primed and ready to support you on launch day. Ask them to create accounts on Product Hunt ahead of time and follow your launch from the Coming Soon feed to build excitement.

• Build an audience. There are a number of ways you can do this. One of the most popular has become #buildinginpublic. Makers who build in public use social channels and online communities (including our own) to do things like post about what they’re building, share roadblocks you’re facing, and ask for help on deciding key features and priorities. They contributing to conversations where they can and are helpful (i.e. they don’t just ask for things but engage with other people who are #buildinginpublic who need help).

Here are a couple great resources about building in public:

Why you should build your product in public - Ryan Hoover

How To Build In Public As A Founder Successfully - KP

• Host an AMA. Something else you can do is host an "Ask Me Anything" discussion on Product Hunt to help promote your launch and find early supporters.

• Get the whole team involved. It’s not just you who can be helpful. Try engaging the other makers involved in your project — designers, product managers, marketers, and engineers — to engage in Discussions (like this) and give great feedback on other launches. Your community will multiply much faster.

Launch Day Promotion

Your two most important tasks on launch day are getting the word out, and being accessible to the community by responding to comments in real time or as close to it as possible. If you’re launching with a team, you can plan to split up responsibilities or take shifts in responding to feedback.

Don’t forget to use all of the tools available to you too. Here are some pro tips:

• Launch Day Dashboard: Your dashboard helps you keep track of comments, upvotes, reviews and more. Learn more here.

• Embeds and Badges: Drop these onto your website. They do a great job driving traffic to your launch.

• Email: This is one of your strongest tools. Don’t forget to prep any newsletters you have.

• LinkedIn: Don’t forget that description under your image as well as your post

• In-App Notifications: We’ve seen some great in-app banners

• Communities where you’ve been active: Launch day is not a time to go spamming Reddit and Indie Hackers if you haven’t already been posting there, but if you’ve built a community elsewhere, don’t forget to let them know too.

How NOT to market

These rules usually come down to a concept: Don’t be spammy.

• Don’t ask for upvotes. Ask for feedback, comments, opinions, help spreading the word, not for upvotes. We believe people should upvote and comment because they authentically like a product, not because they’re peer pressured into doing so. Asking specifically for upvotes is against our policies so we may ask you to stop and remove any social posts, etc.

• Don’t run contests that require upvotes or reward people for upvotes. Again, spammy. Running a contest separate from your Product Hunt launch on your launch day is okay (have at it!), but if we see that you (or anyone else related to your launch like a hunter or someone you have paid) are running a contest or giveaway that rewards people for their upvote, we will ask you to stop. If you continue doing so, we may unfeature your product.

• Don’t spam people. Sending hundreds of people the same tweet or scraping and sending unsolicited emails has the opposite effect of what you’re hoping for (seriously, the people you are messaging will let us know how mad it makes them!) Be authentic. 😊

To be clear, it’s important to share your product and get the word out. What we’re trying to avoid is behavior that hurts the community. You’re better off focusing on authentic ways of connecting with users and thinking of creative ways to promote your product.

Common Product Hunt pre-launch mistakes

• Asking your community to join only on the day of your launch and not before.

• Not preparing your website or content for launch

• Not using all the tools at your disposal to tell your community about your launch early.

• Failing to set measurable goals, or assuming the only goal that matters is Product of the Day.

• Scheduling or posting their product too late in the day if you don't have limitations.