For anyone launching a new product, the day you register your product on Product Hunt is a big deal. We launched Fireup for public on the 1st of August but it was not until we put Fireup on Product Hunt on the 10th of August that the feeling really sunk in. We did see huge traction and a lot of registrations the day our product appeared on Product Hunt. We just followed a few simple techniques to get our product listed and Fireup did trend in the top 10 products of the day. Below is a list of some of the things we did. Hopefully it will help someone who is about to launch their product.
A lot of blog posts about How to get your product popular on Product Hunt tell you that you should find a hunter. If your product is posted by a popular hunter, there is a much higher chance of success. However we decided that we would not go that route and decided to post our product ourselves. Here is how we went about our registration on Product Hunt.
Creating a simple product tagline
Your tagline is your only chance to get people instantly interested in your product. We did spend a lot of time coming up with our tagline. Our objectives while creating this tagline were very clear. Our tagline should be extremely easy to understand, should convey exactly what our product does, should be appealing to the PH audience and should not be a sales pitch.
This might look simple but we put in a lot of time and effort playing with different combinations of words to come up with our tagline. A lot of times we were tempted to use terms such as interactive timeline, media rich story, infographic journey, live storyboard etc. However at all times we kept our objective of -having a simple tagline that conveys our product in the best possible way to the PH audiences – in our minds to come up with the existing timeline.
We were also very aware of the crowd that we were writing the tagline for. Product Hunt community is very tech savvy, product loving people and we were extremely conscious of not using any media or marketing jargons in our tagline.
Lastly we were also very careful that the tagline is not a sales pitch. Product Hunt guidelines clearly tell you that you cannot make a sales pitch and although we believe that no one does this on purpose one should be careful that you are not doing this unknowingly as well.
Adding the right mockups of your product
Product hunt allows you to add a few mockups with your product. Make sure that your first mockup clearly and easily conveys what your product is all about. Also make sure that you do not add too many mockups and confuse the readers. This is pretty straight forward and we did not spend a lot of time on this.
Introducing your product in your comment
Once you have added your product on PH you can put in more description about your product in a comment. We knew that this was our last chance to attract attention and we did spend a lot of time coming up with our description.
For a number of days before we launched Fireup we having been mailing people about Fireup for feedback on our idea, emails to register on Fireup, writing to our friends and family about it. Before we came up with our PH description we went through all these emails to look at how people were reacting to different Fireup introductions. Going through these emails and understanding people’s reactions to each email helped us create our product description. We also made sure that we gave the introduction a personal touch by talking about how the product is useful to us. Giving example helped a lot in making sure that people quickly understood how Fireup could be used.
Spreading the word
Once our product was registered on Product Hunt there was nothing more we could do on Product Hunt but just wait until midnight PST when the product will get featured in the today section. So we decided to go ahead and email our network about it. We also spread the word through social network.
While we were building the product we were in touch with a number of people for feedback, tech queries etc. We made sure that we emailed all of them to tell them that we were going to be featured on PH the next day and we would love to hear their feedback.
We also contacted a few Product Hunt influencers via twitter and informed them about our product ready to be featured the next day also sending them a link with the product.
Interacting with the Product Hunt Community
Once Fireup appeared in the today section of Product Hunt we made sure that we engaged with the community and responded to every interaction. Every time someone up voted Fireup we made sure that we thanked them via twitted or followed them on Product Hunt. We made sure that we reacted to each and every comment quickly and also thanked our commenters on twitter for their support.
Product Hunt has been an extremely useful tool for us in spreading the word about Fireup among our target audiences. A lot of tech blogs in the USA and in Europe wrote about Fireup once it was featured on Product Hunt and that drove a lot of registrations for us from across the world. The Fireup team would like to thank the Product Hunt team for creating a platform that enables companies like Fireup to get such recognition.
