How Product Hunt helped us become #1 Product of the Day

I will start with the result, last Friday my dream came true, after the first launch on Product Hunt in 2015, when I posted our product at an ungodly hour and each day looked on the homepage to see if we will get featured to the day that Hiten Shah hunted us and become #1 Product of the Day.

To give you a bit of context, Waydev is helping engineering leaders to be data-driven by tracking the activity from their Git provider; we had five launches on Product Hunt. One of the launches failed, in two of them, we've launched the wrong product for the wrong target, but with the help from the Product Hunt community we refined our audience and built the right product. Let me tell you our story of how we convinced Hiten Shah to hunt us and became the #1 Product of the Day.

Lesson learned: We started working at Waydev in March 2017, and we had our first Product with this launched, it was our first MVP that was meant help non-technical founder have better visibility into the engineering team. We had some users, but our Product was full of bugs, and we were not able to see if we're on the right track or not, and we continued building new features of that Product. The Product Hunt community didn't react positively.

Lesson learned: After we managed to add more features and were happier with our Product we decided to launch again, it was after about 8 months of hard work, and we thought that everyone would be more excited with our Product, but we encountered a massive amount of negative feedback, almost 80 comments saying our solution won't work. This was our first red flag regarding our target and our Product. We continued to work on the Product, but a few months later when we were not accepted by Y Combinator, we realized something is wrong, we returned to our Product Hunt launch and tried to understand what is wrong, and we decided to build a new product for engineering leaders which we will test in a new Product Hunt Launch.

Lesson learned: With this launch, we wanted to test our new Product, and our new target, we were eager to test if we will encounter negative feedback. Fortunately, we didn't see any negative feedback and the Product Hunt community reacted fine, we had some new users and in just one month from the launch we managed to acquire our first paying customer where we realized now we're on the right track and we're building what people want.

Lesson learned: This launch was a disaster for me, after years of trying to convince Hiten Shah to hunt us, and finally managed to hunt us, we didn't get featured. Why? Because I didn't know we need to have at least six months between the launches. I tried for hours to convince Product Hunt to make an exception, but without success, we had to wait another two months in order to launch again.

Lesson learned: And finally, after 23 months since the first launch we managed to be the #1 Product of the Day by listening to ProductHunt's community feedback and building a very good product.

If you'd like to learn more about how to launch a product on Product Hunt: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-get-in-top-5-products-on-product-hunt-and-get-in-their-newsletter-2a2ac20e471f