At LogicLoop, we launched our AI SQL Copilot on Product Hunt in 2023, ranking Top 3.
Product of the Day #3 for LogicLoop AI SQL Copilot
Who is this Product Hunt launch guide for
This Product Hunt launch guide is for other founders and makers who are first-timers on Product Hunt on a tight deadline with limited resources, and little pre-existing branding.
Here's a copyable version of this guide you can view at a glance and share with your team.
LogicLoop's Startup Product Hunt launch guide
Deciding if you should do a Product Hunt launch
Before we jump in, you’ll want to decide whether to invest in a Product Hunt launch at all, vs other marketing strategies. We made the decision to experiment with Hacker News and Product Hunt launches with the AI SQL Copilot product, since we’re experimenting with a self-serve motion for data analysts and engineers. How much leverage you can get out of your launches entirely depends on whether your target audience frequents these websites.
Goals for your Product Hunt launch
You could do a Product Hunt launch for different reasons, the most common ones being either to rank highly to prepare you for a press release or to drive signups. For us, we wanted to drive signups and brand awareness through content and SEO. We explicitly deprioritized getting the highest rank we could, since we were more keen to drive user activity.
Monday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday tend to be less competitive days to launch. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are harder to rank higher but get more user traffic. So, depending on your goals you can plan your launch on the right days for you.
How much effort to put into a Product Hunt launch
You need to think about when to launch and how much effort to put in. Most blogs recommend dedicating a couple hours per day and leaving 4-6 weeks to prepare for your launch. It’s been a busy quarter here, so we actually only had about 2 weeks worth of working days to prepare for the launch. There are several guides that cover the entire process, which we linked below. We selected what matters the most for startups, and condensed it into a 2 week plan.
Launch Timeline
This is a simplified launch timeline, if you are on a time and resource crunch.
Week 1
All team members create Product Hunt accounts & become active in the community
Prepare website and landing page materials for launch
Upload content to Product Hunt launch & create an Upcoming page
Week 2
Put together supporter lists from users, friends, investors and social audience
Write up a Launch Day plan (see below)
Create an internal reference doc: messages to supporters, marketing collateral, FAQs etc. to make sure the team has a unified voice
Week 3
Message supporters a day ahead of launch
Execute launch
Launch Day Plan
This is a simpler version of the plan we followed on Launch Day. You’ll want to launch at 12:01 am PT to make sure you have the full 24 hours on the site.
Day before launch
Prepare and schedule social media posts (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Warm up close supporters
Time of launch (12 am to 1:30 am):
Make sure the scheduled launch posted and appears on the feature page
Initial maker team’s comments
Rally Asia/Europe/Africa supporters
Update Product Hunt banner on LogicLoop site
Early Game (7 am to 2 pm):
Post to socials, send out messages and emails to Americas supporters
Respond to Product Hunt questions
Mid Game (2 pm to 5 pm):
Counteract dip in activity by generally being active on Product Hunt
Prepare the next round of support after the work day
Late Game (5 pm to midnight):
Rally Pacific and Asia/Europe supporters towards the end
Through the day, respond to comments, post on social media and spread out supporter outreach.
Learnings
Most guides will stop at the launch plan. Here’s some of what we learned actually executing on the plan above.
The first 60-90 minutes of the launch are really important, even though you’re not ranked until the first four hours of the day. Hence, having an international audience that can support you really does help.
Never ask for upvotes, only ask for support. Upvotes aren’t the only thing that matters anyway. The exact algorithm is a secret, but I bet it's a combination of upvotes, comment activity and depth of discussion, user engagement with your materials and click throughs to the site. We also noticed that Reviews were a nice way to capture datapoints from existing users of our product.
The video does matter – we noticed that 75% of viewers actually finished watching our video.
You are not penalized for sharing the actual link to your Product, from all public sources.
Prioritize 1:1 outreach over blasting huge lists and forums, but of course, use both if you have limited resources. In addition to your audience, active Product Hunter users and those launching products soon are a great community to engage.
Have a lightweight decision tree of your Plan A/B/C etc. depending on where you are, at different times in the day. For instance, for us, we were flipping between #3 and #4 for the latter half of the launch, and put a lot of effort into the sustaining support in the last few hours of the launch, which cemented us at #3.
We only posted a couple times on social media updating our audience on how the launch was going. We noticed quite a few founders take their entire audience with them on this journey, which we’d consider doing next time.
We have a mix of distributed and in-person teams, but did this launch fully distributed. It was a big moment for the team, and doing the launch in a distributed manner allowed us all to be in a comfortable home environment.
Impact of launching on Product Hunt on the business
A week after our Product Hunt launch, here are some of our observations on how it’s helped us:
We saw a decent spike in overall traffic driven to the site.
We saw a spike in # signups, which was the goal, but it’s too early to tell the LTV of users driven from this channel.
One of the biggest side benefits was we drummed up a lot of social media, investor and partner interest. There will be downstream benefits from media, SEO bumps etc. but that is also too early to tell.
Closing thoughts on doing a Product Hunt launch
Any launch is expensive for a startup, in terms of time, resources and focus. Overall, this Product Hunt launch had a lot of good effects for LogicLoop. We continue to collaborate really well cross-functionally, generated a lot of social media buzz and good will, and learnt some valuable lessons about the idiosyncrasies of the platform we can use for an even bigger launch next time.
We’ll stay tuned on the ongoing effects of having done this launch, but are proud that we checked it off our experiments list!
Resources
These are some great quick resources to get up to speed on the whole process:
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