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Is launching on Product Hunt worth it?

August 6, 2021

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.

Alpe Audio Product Launch Video — we wanted to stick out from the doodle and screen shot videos 🙂

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:

  • Resources for how to launch on Product Hunt
  • What we did
  • End results and analysis on whether it was worth it
  • Product hunt launch myths

Let’s get started.

How to launch on Product Hunt: Definitive resources

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).

How we launched Alpe Audio on Product Hunt

We followed the best practices you’ll find in the above resources. Here are the 9 most important things to do.

  1. Find a fantastic hunter. We did in Hiten Shah through friends of friends.
  2. Set KPIs for launch — what do we care about and why are we putting in the work.
  3. Search for forums to post our launch in: mainly Facebook and Slack groups².
  4. Start engaging with other launches on Product Hunt 4–8 weeks in advance to build acquaintances and ‘learn the talk’.
  5. Most important: build a google doc of users, friends, family, supporters and basically everyone you know who can support the launch. We reached out to them 4 weeks in advance of the launch and asked them to create a Product Hunt account and play around with the platform.
    This was absolutely critical, as we discovered on the day of our launch that Product Hunt penalizes votes from new accounts (or accounts that weren’t active) and despite the fact that these were real Alpe Audio users — ~200 votes were detracted from us on our launch day. This hurt — A LOT.
  6. Prepare social media calendar for the days before and day of launch (multiple posts from each social media account).
  7. Prepare newsletter blasts to users asking for support.
  8. Prepare follow up emails to thank supporters and convert interested parties. Most people forget the follow up, but it’s a critical part of reaching the launch KPIs.
  9. Created creatives: our lovely launch video (see above ), Product Hunt website widget and a special Product Hunt offer landing page.

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.

We’ve launched several products on Product Hunt, including the Alpe Article to Audio Conversion Kit

2 Important things we learned

  1. It’s much harder to have a successful launch on Product Hunt when you don’t run in tech circles. Most of our users, friends and supporters had never heard of Product Hunt and the sign up process isn’t as smooth as one might want. It’s also unclear to them why they have to log in and engage with the platform just for their vote to count.
  2. You can send people directly to your product page. Despite our research, it was unclear whether it’s better to send people to the Product Hunt homepage or directly to the product launch page. On the day of our launch we reached out to the Product Hunt team to understand why ~200 votes weren’t being counted and this was something we discovered as part of that conversation.

So, after all the work, was it worth it?

Is launching on Product Hunt 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:

  1. 10,000+ eyeballs on our website and social media accounts. There’s something to be said for having a ‘launch’ day, Product Hunt or not. It galvanizes the team, friends and users around a specific event and so we received more shares, retweets and organic engagement than any other normal day. It’s important to note that most of these didn’t actually come through the Product Hunt launch, rather from the buzz we generated around it.
  2. 300+ app downloads. On the two days spanning our launch (depending on time zone) we had over 300 app installs, which could easily cost $1500 at a $5 CPI.
  3. 20 new subscribers. Our launch was among the first few days we shifted to a subscription model so while 20 subscriptions was less than what we had hoped for, it was still a good boost and the users who joined have been high quality engaged users.
  4. Future launches are easier: Once you’ve built up a community on Product Hunt launching successive products becomes easier. Most of your audience now has a Product Hunt account and can support you next time more easily. This last point is critical in my opinion. We tend to think of a launch as a ‘one and done’ type event, but in reality we have many products to launch and the compounding effect of re-launching is fantastic. The second and third time we launched products (Creativity Booster and the Alpe Audio Conversion Kit) our launches achieved a decent amount of traction with MUCH less work.

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.

Common Product Hunt launch myths & questions

How often should I launch a product on Product Hunt?

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.

Should I send people to my product or the Product Hunt home page?

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/


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