We launched Alpe Audio on Product Hunt and took #1 Product of the day. Was it worth it?
We spent ~70 hours in aggregate working on our launch. Is launching on Product Hunt worth it? I’ll walk through how we launched, our 9 item checklist, common myths about Product Hunt and finally share our results and whether it was worth it.
Not all Product Hunt launches are similar. B2B is vastly different from B2C or dev focused platforms. So first off, what is Alpe Audio?
For young professionals who need to learn and master new topics, but have a busy lifestyle, Alpe is an audio education platform (think Coursera meets podcasts), that enables you to master topics from A-Z in the time you have — which is when you’re ‘on the go’ — commuting, running errands or out for a jog.
Now that we’re on the same page, I’ll break this post down into a few sections:
Let’s get started.
There are many, many, MANY resources on how to launch on Product Hunt, so I won’t rehash them, but I will share the best blogs and resources we read to prepare.
And a few more blogs which I’ll add links to below¹.
Many blogs, many resources. We read them all, and I recommend you do too — they’re easy reads: most are written for SEO purposes and are fairly quick & repetitive, but inevitably you’ll find one additional nugget in each one.
Despite reading these and speaking to several CEOs in advance of our launch, we still discovered a few new things on our launch day (see below).
We followed the best practices you’ll find in the above resources. Here are the 9 most important things to do.
Of all these activities, reaching out to supporters ahead of time and asking them to sign up and support us on the day of was the longest, hardest and most gratifying part. Yes, it’s tiring to ask people for favors, but this is also what brings in support, kind words and positive energy.
So, after all the work, was it worth it?
‘Worth it’ is a relative term. For us it was, despite traffic, signups and purchases undershooting our expectations.
So why was it worth it?
The benefits to launching were:
So was our Product Hunt launch worth it? Given our cost of the ~70 hours we spent preparing the launch (and that we self produced all our creatives), then undoubtedly yes.
You should keep five or six months between products relating to the same company. Product Hunt doesn’t allow launches of the same thing on a closer time frame. So keep that in mind when you’re figuring out what to launch.
This is a common myth – that you need to send upvoters to the Product Hunt home page and then let them navigate to your product but this is completely not the case as we discovered in a direct chat with the Product Hunt support team. No need to cause your community the extra hassle – just send them to the direct product page.
[1] More blogs: https://cxl.com/blog/product-hunt/, https://foundr.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-launching-on-product-hunt, https://www.ampliz.com/resources/product-hunt-launch-guide/, https://mobilemonkey.com/blog/product-hunt-launch-strategy
[2] Facebook & Slack groups:
Slack groups: product-school.slack.com, startupstudygroup.slack.com, launch-chat.slack.com, Growthhackertalk.slack.com
FB groups: www.facebook.com/groups/producthuntupvoters, www.facebook.com/groups/producthunt.exchange, Product hunt IL, Supertools, The B2Cs, https://www.facebook.com/groups/growthhackertalk,
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/growthhackertalk/