How To Launch Your SaaS Start-up On Product Hunt
In the past few months I've been involved with launching a number of SaaS products on Product Hunt, a community where early adopters discover the latest new technology products. Product Hunt is the best site of its kind, followed by Betalist; both sites represent a unique opportunity for early stage start-ups to gather product feedback and land their first users.
There are plenty of "How To Launch On Product Hunt" guides already out there, and I've devoured most of them at this point. My first piece of advice is to take it straight from the horse's mouth - Product Hunt has published two guides on the topic themselves.
The reason for this post is twofold; first, the best way to launch on Product Hunt has changed pretty dramatically, so a lot of the content that's already out there is outdated. Second, I'll give an honest assessment of my own experience in terms of what worked for us and what didn't.
Let's do it.
Is Product Hunt's Ship product worth it?
Product Hunt's Ship product is a suite of tools designed to help you gather product feedback and build an audience prior to officially launching your product on Product Hunt. I will admit that I was at first skeptical about Ship, but I decided to pony up the $79 per month to give the product a whirl. I realized a few benefits from using Ship.
Ship allows you to schedule your launch on Product Hunt. Honestly this is mostly a convenience thing, but it's a nice perk of using Ship. Without Ship, you need to fill out all of information required to launch a product in real-time per se; what this means in practice is that it's been the norm for people to wake up at ungodly hours to launch their product, maximize the amount of time they have to accumulate upvotes, and get something of a first-mover advantage.
This is definitely helpful in terms of planning your launch; you can set expectations with your internal team in terms of exactly when your product will launch, and you can easily schedule other promotional activities to work in tandem with your selected launch time. This was also helpful to me because it allowed me to reach out to the Product Hunt team in advance and let them know exactly when we were planning to launch (more on why I did this shortly).
Ship represents a massive opportunity for influencer marketing and virality. In all honesty, there used to be a pretty fool proof way to all but guarantee a successful launch on Product Hunt if you could just pull it off; getting an influencer with a large following to "hunt" your product. I'm talking a Jason Lemkin or a Hiten Shah type. In the past if you were able to recruit an influencer with a large following to hunt your product on launch day, it would automatically notify all of their followers via email that they had hunted your product driving a ton of traffic and upvotes to your page.
This tactic doesn't work anymore... unless you use Ship. So if you have a personal connection to a major industry influencer, or have someone like that on your board, or can simply convince an influencer to subscribe to your product then you can still reap this benefit. This is a pretty smart monetization strategy by the team over at PH.
How this works today is if you are using Ship, you are allowed to build an "Upcoming Product" page that Product Hunt will also help promote. Get your influencer to subscribe to your upcoming project page, and all of their connections will be automatically notified. Bingo, you've tapped into the virality benefit that PH used to offer. If you know someone with a significant following on Product Hunt, Ship is absolutely worth the $79 per month.
Ship allows you to directly communicate with people interested in your product prior to launch. Ship captures contact information for anyone who subscribes to your upcoming page and allows you to email them directly. The number of people who subscribe to your upcoming page is a decent barometer for how much interest there will be in your product, but on top of that this is useful in terms of gathering feedback on your product prior to launch and communicating updates to your subscribers to keep them in the know as your launch day approaches.
Tips for launch day
The mechanics of writing a good Product Hunt listing are covered well elsewhere; tips for writing solid taglines, adding relevant images, a descriptive GIF, etc. What follows are additional promotional tactics that proved valuable.
Email "Upcoming" page subscribers. If you did take advantage of Ship, PH gives you the tools to directly email all of your upcoming page subscribers. This is a no-brainer, as these people have already expressed interest in what you are working on. On launch day take the time to send every subscriber a personalized email letting them know about your product launch and asking them to upvote your product. I think you'll find that just about everyone will oblige; this represents low hanging fruit.
Email else anyone who has expressed interest in your product. At Outseta we are pretty protective of the audience that we've built. While lots of "how to launch on Product Hunt" guides suggests blasting every email contact and social channel that you have at your disposal on launch day, I think this is overkill and can lead to lots of people being hit with duplicate, poorly targeted messages.
As with any marketing campaign, you need to consider your audience. You might sell to an industry that is altogether unfamiliar with Product Hunt; if that's the case, you're going to get little value emailing that audience about your PH launch.
If you have contacts that you feel are likely to be Product Hunt users, by all means notify them of your launch. Beyond that I'd advocate for only reaching out to contacts that have expressed legitimate interest in your product in some way, perhaps as beta users. In this case even if the contacts aren't PH users, they may be invested enough in your idea to create a PH account in order to upvote your idea.
Product Hunt allows new users to login with existing Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin accounts. They must then complete some configuration settings around their name and title, as well as the types of products they are most interested in. This is a pretty easy process, but spell it out in your email approach so that you recipients know exactly what your ask is of them and how they can go about delivering on your ask.
Tweet at Product Hunt. Tweet a link directly to your listing @ProductHunt. Don't include any other hashtags. It's in PH's best interest to also share particularly well designed and launched products.
Share a relevant "collection" of related products. Product Hunt allows you to assemble "collections" of related products. Prior to your launch, take some time to build a collection of products that are relevant and useful to your own product's potential users. For example, when we launched Outseta I compiled a collection entitled "The Day One SaaS Start-up." Every product in the collection is relevant to our audience and complimentary to our own product.
Once you've assembled your collection, reach out to Niv Dror who is in charge of community at Product Hunt (Niv@producthunt.com or @Nivo0o0 on Twitter). This is a good way to get your collection in front of the team at PH, in hopes that they will help promote the collection that you've assembled.
Conclusion
Product Hunt is just one channel to get the word out about your SaaS start-up, but it's an inexpensive one that can serve as a serious catalyst for finding your product's initial users. Follow the guidance outlined in this post and you'll have a better chance of making your Product Hunt launch as impactful as possible.
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