Product Hunt is like the new cool kid on the block – everybody wants to hang out with him and tell the world about their new best friend.
Have you heard about this new cool kid?
If you haven’t, then don’t worry. You still have time to become friends with them. This article will tell every one of his secrets and how you can make it your best ally when it comes to implementing a marketing strategy.
What Is Product Hunt?
PH is a community type platform where people can submit a new product they’ve been working on. Here are some of the main categories that they have on the website:
- Developer Tools
- Bots
- iPhone
- Productivity
- Books
- Email Marketing
- User Experience
- Lifehacks
- Marketing
- Social Media Tools
You can discover all of them here.
If you’re an author, a podcaster, a marketer or a product creator and you’re helping build a product that fits into one of these categories, then you should consider launching it on PH as well.
If you just need to know about the best things that are available for free, Product Hunt is a good place to find that out as well.
It can help you find amazing books to learn from, great SEO tools for your business, awesome podcasts (from people like Neil Patel). You can get discounts to many products and you can try out the latest digital marketing tools.
Product Hunt is a community of people who love hearing about the hottest and coolest apps, tools, websites, or projects. This might sound pretty basic, but there’s actually a lot more to it.
It’s all related to the Product Adoption Curve.
Ovi Negrean, Chief nugget at nugget, did a great job at explaining this concept in his ultimate guide to launching on Product Hunt, so I’ll do my best to do the same.
Here it goes.
When launching a new product, you’re going to use many different strategies and communication channels. You want to make sure that as many people as possible hear about your product and try it out.
As far as your audience goes, you’re most likely not targeting everyone, but an audience with a particular profile.
Then, there’s the fact that each product that has ever been launched and will ever launch will go through some phases. It all starts with tech enthusiasts and ends with skeptics. Skeptics are resistant to change, so you can’t be bothered with them.
Tech enthusiasts, on the other hand, are exactly the audience you want to reach when launching a new product.
Why? It’s simple.
They will test your product even if it’s not pitch perfect and is still a little buggy. They will even help you improve it.
Uber is one of the companies that went to innovators first and then reached early adopters. Its success is partly due to this strategy. Of course, the hundreds of millions of dollars in investments had an impact as well.
Product Hunt is a community of tech enthusiasts, who are exactly the people you need to reach in the first phase of launching a new product.
The chances are that, if your product is really good, you’ll manage to attract a lot of advocates and influencers who will help you get that much needed initial traction.
Now that you know what PH is, it’s time to see how it actually works.
How Product Hunt Works
This is what the PH homepage looks like.
As you can see, you can browse the community and explore an abundance of topics. The homepage feed is sorted chronologically, and here you will only see products that were posted by a particular type of users and that managed to get the highest amount of upvotes.
While you can see all the products that have been posted and read all about them, you can’t upvote them.
To do that, you need to create an account, which is easy to do.
You have the Login button on the upper right side of the screen. You can choose to login with Twitter or Facebook.
And just like that, you now have access to the PH community.
Upvoting is super useful for you, as a marketer. Why? – Because it will help you easily form lists of all the latest and greatest tools that you can use to take your WordPress or business to the next level.
In your profile you will have a list of everything you’ve upvoted and you’ll always be able to come back to it. I, for example, still find some pretty awesome marketing tools that I bookmarked a couple of years ago, and even the Pitch Deck used by SEOmoz (now called MOZ) to get over 10 millions of dollars in investments.
Let’s see how you can upvote a product.
You can either start browsing through all the topics, or you can type in the search bar a name of a product you’re already using.
Let’s take Slack for example.
Right next to the “GET IT” button, there’s another one with a number on it. Those numbers represent how many people upvoted this product. By clicking it, you’ll be upvoting for it as well.
In the screenshot above, I clicked on those circles with faces on them. This shows you all the people that have upvoted the product. You can click on their name to see their Product Hunt profile and then follow them if you want to receive notifications about the products they post.
Also, if you’re an Author and you want to launch a book (just an example) you can use those lists of people to build a potential buyers list for your own book when you will launch it.
PH is a pretty closed off community because new users that have just created an account cannot post a product right away. They first have to upvote products on a regular basis, engage with the community and show their value.
You don’t even have the ability to comment, even if you have upvoted a product. You can request to do so, but that doesn’t guarantee anything. The PH team will accept your request based on a few different factors.
Product Hunt manages to bring so much value because:
- Not everyone can create an account and post right away
- The comment section is also protected by filtering the people who have commenting rights
Now, you’ll notice that some users have an M or an H next to their profile photo.
The M stands for Maker, which means that it’s the profile of a person that created a particular product (there can be several, as you can see above).
The H stands for Hunter, which means a user who has the rights to post products to the platform (aka hunt it.)
A user that decides to hunt a product doesn’t necessarily have to be the maker. In fact, in most cases, some people love a product so much that they decide to post it on behalf of a company. There are probably some products which have been posted, and their makers don’t even know about this.
OK, by now, you should have a pretty good understanding of what PH is and how it works. It’s time to get into more real stuff and discover the reasons why you should consider launching your product on PH.
Why You Should Launch On Product Hunt
There’s an interesting shift happening nowadays. Traditional PR will most likely be dead soon because it will be replaced by influencer marketing.
Marketers, I’d recommend focusing more on finding influencers for your products and not sending mass press releases to media outlets. People are slowly starting to lose interest in those as they’d rather follow online influencers.
Let’s imagine that the launch of your product is coming up. You’ve already planned out a strategy, established KPIs, put together a team, and everything looks pretty much flawless. The odds say that the launch is going to be a success.
But the big question is: are you going to reach the desired audience that will help you get traction?
Here are my top reasons why Product Hunt is THE place to launch your product:
- You will get plenty of traffic. Not only that but the traffic that will come from PH will translate into conversions, whether it’s sign ups or sales. Because, as we’ve already established, it’s a community of tech enthusiasts, these people will want to be the first ones to test your product.
- Your visibility will increase in the upcoming days as well. Product Hunt sends a daily and a weekly newsletter to all of its subscribers. If you made it to the homepage and you were in top 5, you’re going to be featured in their emails as well. This basically means that tens of hundreds of people will read about your new product.
- Increase your visibility on social media. PH has hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter alone. One single tweet about your launch can go a long way. Other people will definitely be retweeting their post so just think about the impact.
- You’ll get real feedback. I’m not saying that you won’t get real feedback from other places. What I’m saying is that the people on PH will embrace your product with flaws and all and are willing to help you make it better – if it’s not already, of course.
- Free press. If your product is really that great, then you won’t even have to bother pitching it to dozens of media outlets. They will naturally come to you and feature your product in their publications.
You’ll get all of these benefits. Just by launching in one single place. Isn’t that amazing?
Successful Product Hunt Launches
There are tons of great articles out there that talk about how people decided to launch on PH and how they turned it into a massive success.
Here is just one of these stories.
What Have We Learned Today?
Product Hunt, even though it’s kind of an exclusive community, managed to grow massively in two years.
What’s even more interesting is that the traditional way of launching a product is not capable of generating the same interest. Not anymore.
We have to think outside manuals and old-fashioned ways of doing things, especially when it comes to marketing.
My advice is to head over to Product Hunt now, browse their topics, see what people are discussing and start upvoting some of your favorite products. I’m sure you’ll find other cool things as well and you’ll be hooked in no time.
If you have any questions about PH, feel free to post them in the comment section. I’ll be happy to answer them for you.
Happy hunting!
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