The power of product hunt for any startup and our experience with it.
Greetings from Dashmote! We are a Dutch startup in Amsterdam aiming to change the way you search for high-quality visual content. Today is a big day here in the Dashmote office because we have just been posted on Product Hunt!
For those of you who are already familiar with Product Hunt, you may be curious as to how you can use this platform to greatly expand your markets and bring awareness to your product. For those of you who are not yet familiar, you may be wondering...
What is Product Hunt?
Product Hunt is an online community built with the idea to empower early adopters to discover and share new products. Product Hunters can submit a product, but the community decides together whether the product is good by giving upvotes. The top product will get more attention by the newsletter and subscribers. This platform allows many startups to gain a growth spurt in an early stage.
How a startup can use Product Hunt!
If the product grabs attention on product hunt it can get between 5k to 250k new users. In early stage startups, this can mean two months of marketing efforts in just 24 hours! Easily put: successful Product Hunts can grow your business while saving your company loads of time and money. It can also grab the attention of the press. However, not all products on PH are successful. Only the top ten products each day are featured in the weekly newsletters and other media outreach efforts. So, how can you make it in the top ten? Besides gaining the most upvotes and comments, here are some other ways you can help boost your rank.
Three best practices:
- Don’t request upvotes
- Establish a PH community prior to launch
- Focus on your tagline, image & offer
Product Hunt is a smart system. By that, I mean they have ways of knowing whether or not your votes and comments are organic or if they are coming from a mass marketing effort to newly established Product Hunters. The reason for this is the Product Hunt wants to encourage genuine feedback and community participation. For this reason, you should avoid sharing the direct link to your PH product page. Instead, share the general producthunt.com link and suggest that people search for your company or “checkout” your page. Do not request upvotes. This will also trigger negative feedback in the PH algorithm.
Another way to address this issue is to establish a network of Product Hunt users prior to launching your product on the platform. This will guarantee you high-quality upvotes that will boost your rank much faster than ‘newbies’.
Lastly, do not underestimate the power of your product page. Because many people on PH have likely never seen your product, this will be their first impression. And because you are trying to win their votes, you want to make it a good one! Coverr.co wrote a blogpost about how they managed to get ranked #1 and gain 1,200 upvotes on Product Hunt, and one of the main reasonings outlined in the post is the product’s tagline. They argue that having the word “free” in their tagline helped bring in a great deal of votes. Capture the attention of hunters by pairing an eye-catching tagline with an intriguing image and last but not least, an exclusive offer for voters.
Product Hunt for Product Launch
Dashmote was planning to use Product Hunt to launch our product. By launching the product yourself, you have more control over marketing efforts because you can launch it when the product is fine-tuned and you are prepared with a plan. However, with product hunt sometimes you are not in control when it is posted. You can be hunted at any given time! In our case, it was unexpected. Today we were hunted by Chris Messina who is Developer Experience Lead at Uber.
Now our journey is to keep the ball rolling and gain as much awareness as we can! We are grateful for the feature, as this is a great source of feedback for us. So, if you are not a current Hunter, you should join now! And when you do, check out our page and support us on our hunt.