Our Secret Recipe for Product Hunt 👀

Hey Folks, we recently launched on Product Hunt and are proud to announce that we won Product of the Day!

eFounders, the startup studio backing us, has an outstanding track-record on Product Hunt. Feeling generous after our big week, we thought we’d share our magic recipe…

Let’s break down the process: What to expect? How to prepare? What risks to take?

Hey, what did you expect? — Uma Thurman

It’s important to keep in mind that certain categories of products naturally tend to drive more engagement on Product Hunt. Simply looking at its top 10 products of all time you’ll notice a pattern: Slack, Notion, Station, etc…They’re all productivity tools for prosumers. Generally speaking, consumer oriented products are more likely to succeed on Product Hunt than B2B products.

The second major consideration is what you want to test. Offering a full, rich experience of your product will obviously give you a better chance of succeeding versus a basic landing page with an enticing tagline. But that won’t always be an option. An efficient compromise is to demonstrate your product vision by showcasing one killer feature. This approach will allow you to launch quicker and focus completely. If it’s truly a killer feature, you’ll get hunters to think “Wow that’s cool” and they will want to try more of your product.

Last one is when you want to launch. It’s no secret that traffic on Product Hunt booms on Tuesday and Wednesday. If you manage to make it into the top 5 on either day, you’re in great shape. But more traffic also means more competition, so you need choose a playground where you’ll be sure to stand out.

“Okay but wait, weren’t you supposed to give us the secret recipe that will get us into the top 5 of the day we choose?” Well here comes the 2nd point: Preparation.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail — Benjamin Franklin

The Product Hunt battle should not start on D-Day. Preparation is key: mobilize your early users and reach out to total strangers to test your tagline, your content, your value proposition, your onboarding experience, and so on.

The recipe ⇒ Test, Learn and Iterate.

The only path to the perfect tagline or UX is to test everything, identify mistakes, correct them and test again. For a tangible example, here are the tag-lines we tested:

• “Stories for people at work”,
• “Create interactive IG-like stories & share them anywhere as a URL”,
• “Build mini WebApps in the story format”,
• “Create story-like WebApps”,
• “Create IG-like stories on the web”,
• “Create story-like contents on the web”…

After all of this iteration, we were finally able to land on “Create interactive stories on the web”.

This feedback and iteration phase is an amazing way to build an early community around your product. If people are willing to provide you with feedback, it means they care (okay, at least a little bit) about your product. Keep their contact details, give them an update or two along the way: they are part of your community and your project, they deserve special treatment 🤗.

The best way to do this is through a “Ship” upcoming page (Thanks @Ahmed Men for helping us on this one). Ship is a toolkit offered by Product Hunt to facilitate pre-launch for makers. With Ship you can create a basic landing page in minutes. It offers a very valuable feature that indicates which of your subscribers are active on Product Hunt.

Ship is very handy on D-Day for activating your pre-launch contacts (specifically the Hunters). Thank them with a personal message and celebrate the launch. This small, personal gesture can go a long way: you’ll secure your very 1st upvotes (key for virality) and hopefully your biggest fans will share your product with their network.

Regarding the personal messages: prepare everything before D-Day! Draft a clear plan to follow: Who to contact first, what messages to send, where you relay the info, who’s responsible for what on your team. Clear planning will keep stress down and confidence up when it comes time to execute on D-Day.

Do one thing every day that scares you — Eleanor Roosevelt

The best thing about this thorough preparation is it enables you to test creative ideas. Surprising your pre-launch contacts with bold ideas is the best way to reach the famous “Waw effect”.

For our launch, we knew that our best chance was with the Call To Action we put on our Product Hunt Page. Usually, companies link their page directly to their marketing website. We wanted to surprise Hunters with a unique onboarding process and got great feedback from it, 👉check it out.

What did they enjoy? Firstly: Seeing our product in action with just one click. Secondly: Accessing our editor without a required login. Asking for an email straightaway will kill your conversion rate and eventually bring you signups that will immediately churn if your product disappoint them.

Our secret is simple: be bold enough to stand out from the crowd but always test and iterate before taking risks on D-Day. That’s it folks, we hope this helps and by the way, there’s still lots of time to support us on Product Hunt 🙂, we’re running for Product of the Month 🏅

Special Thanks to @Thomas Groutars @Laure Albouy @Julien Berthomier  @Ken Savage for sharing their tips at first

Previously published at https://medium.com/@arthurbonnecarrere/our-secret-recipe-for-product-hunt-630cf9275fcf