On March 21, 2024 – after over a year of building – we launched Dub.co to the world on Product Hunt.
The results:
- 🥇 #1 Product of the Day
- 🥇 #1 Product of the Week
- 🥇 #1 Product of the Month
Here's a step-by-step playbook of how we did it.
Why launch on Product Hunt?
As the go-to platform for new product launches in tech, Product Hunt is a fantastic place to launch your product for two main reasons:
- Exposure: With over 4.5M monthly visits, a successful Product Hunt launch can get your product in front of thousands of tech enthusiasts and potential customers.
- SEO boost: With a domain rating of 91, Product Hunt is one of the highest authority sites on the web. A backlink from Product Hunt can give your site a nice SEO boost.
Every day, hundreds – if not thousands – of new products are launched on Product Hunt. To stand out, you need to have a well-thought-out launch strategy.
So, how do you orchestrate a successful Product Hunt launch?
Step 0: Have a great product
This might seem obvious, but it's worth mentioning: to have a successful Product Hunt launch, you need to be building something that people actually want.
This tweet by my good friend Peer Richelsen sums it up well:
Step 1: Build a strong community around your product
This is probably the toughest – yet the most important step in the process.
Months – or even years – before you launch on Product Hunt, you need to build a community of early adopters who are excited about your product. This can come in several forms:
Option 1: Building a Waitlist
Create a killer teaser trailer for your product and set up a waitlist for early access. This is a great way to build anticipation and get people excited about your launch.
A simpler approach is to utilize Product Hunt's teaser page feature to build your waitlist directly on Product Hunt. This worked really well for us.
Option 2: Start/Acquire/Sponsor a newsletter
If you're building a product in a specific niche, consider starting a newsletter around that niche. This can be a great way to build an audience of potential users who are interested in your product.
Alternatively, you can acquire or sponsor a newsletter that already has an audience in your target market. A great example is Loops' acquisition of Workspaces, which came with 12,000+ subscribers that they were able to reach out to on launch day.
Option 3: Build an open-source community
If you're building an open-source product, you have a unique advantage here: leverage your open-source community – whether it's on GitHub or Discord – to create traction early on in your launch.
This is the option that worked best for us – as an open-source product with over 15,000 stars on GitHub, we were able to build a community of developers around Dub.co who were excited about our launch.
Ultimately, the key to building a strong community is to provide value to your users. Whether it's through a waitlist, a newsletter, or an open-source community, the goal is to create a group of people who are excited about your product and willing to support you on launch day.
Step 2: Prepare stellar launch assets
First impressions matter.
When someone lands on your Product Hunt page, you want to make sure they're blown away by your product. To do that, you'll need world-class images for your product carousel.
Here are the ones we made:
Do I need a launch video for my Product Hunt launch?
Contrary to popular opinion, you might not need a launch video for your Product Hunt Launch. Most of the times, the click-through/watch rate on Product Hunt videos are surprisingly low. Instead, focus on creating high-quality images that showcase your product.
Step 3: Pick a launch date
Before you pick a launch date, you need to determine which day of the week works best for your launch.
As a rule of thumb, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are generally considered the best days to launch on Product Hunt. This is when the most people are active on the platform.
The flipside is that these are also the most competitive days to launch, and this is where your community comes in. If you've built a strong community around your product, you can launch on any day of the week and still get to the top of the leaderboard.
In our case, we went with March 21st, 2024 – a Thursday – as our launch date.
Should I use a Hunter to launch my product on Product Hunt?
While getting a popular Hunter to "hunt" your product used to give you a significant leg up on Product Hunt, we've noticed that this is no longer the case. In fact, some of the most successful Product Hunt launches in recent years have been self-submitted – case in point: Cal.com's legendary launch back in 2021 was submitted by the founder himself.
That being said, if you still want to use a Hunter to launch your product, you can find a list of the top Hunters on Product Hunt via Upvote Bell.
Step 4: Launch your teaser page
One week before your actual launch, create your teaser page on Product Hunt. This is a great way to say to the world – "Hey, we're launching our product exactly 1 week from now – mark your calendars!"
We launched our teaser page on March 14 – exactly 1 week before our actual launch on March 21.
We also timed this announcement to go out along with our March Product Update email to our existing email list of 25,000+ users, letting them know about our upcoming launch.
The combination of email + socials worked really well for us, and as we started getting traction on our teaser page, it quickly rose up the ranks and became the #1 trending product on Product Hunt's "Coming Soon" page.
Step 5: Use a short link for your Product Hunt URL
When you launch on Product Hunt, you'll be given the following URLs:
- Product Hub/Teaser page:
https://www.producthunt.com/products/dub - Launch page:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dub
Both these URLs are quite long, which makes it hard to manually type them out or share them on social media. This is where a short link can come in handy.
In our case, we dogfooded our own platform and created an ultra-short link for our Product Hunt launch → d.to/ph
Not only was this short link easy to remember, it also allowed us to reuse the same link for our teaser launch posts and our actual launch posts – all we needed to do was update the destination URL inside Dub when the time came.
In other words, Dub gave us a backdoor edit button to all our tweets and emails – on top of the world-class analytics that came with the platform.
And people loved it:
Dub is the open-source link management platform for modern marketing teams to create marketing campaigns, link sharing features, and referral programs.
Learn more about how you can add your custom domain to Dub for free and use it to create killer short links like d.to/ph.
Step 6: Launch at 12:01 AM PST
The best time to launch on Product Hunt is at 12:01 AM PST. This is when the Product Hunt algorithm resets, and you have the best chance of getting to the top of the leaderboard.
Products that get to the top of the leaderboard early in the day tend to stay there for the rest of the day, so it's crucial to get as many upvotes as possible in the first few hours of your launch.
Here are some of the deliverables we prepared ahead of time for our launch:
Let's dive into each of these deliverables in more detail.
Deliverable 1: Launch Post
Our launch post was concise & straight to the point – largely adapted from our teaser page and coupled with the design assets we prepared earlier.
Dub.co is the link management infrastructure for modern marketing teams. Think of us as the open-source Bitly successor – better features, generous limits, and a delightful user experience. Loved by world-class teams like Framer, Raycast, Perplexity and more.
We also had the opportunity to beta test Product Hunt's new Shoutouts feature, which lets you mention 3 products you couldn't have built your product without.
Our top picks:
Deliverable 1.5: First Comment
You can schedule your first comment ahead of your Product Hunt launch, which can save you some time on launch day.
Your first comment should be thoughtful but concise. Preferably, it also shares a compelling & personal reason about why you decided to build this product. Here's ours:
Interestingly, this comment ended up becoming the most upvoted comment on our launch post.
Deliverable 2: Announcement Email
We scheduled our announcement email to go out at 12:01 AM PST – the exact time we launched on Product Hunt.
View email in browser ↗
We used Flodesk to design and send out our announcement email. Flodesk offers up to 100,000 subscribers for a flat $38/mo ($35/mo if paid yearly), which was perfect for us since we had a list of 25,000+ subscribers. The cherry on top: Their user experience/design is top-notch.
With Flodesk, not only can you schedule your emails, you can also choose the best times to send them for maximum engagement.
Deliverable 3: Social media posts
We crafted a thoughtful & personal thread to announce our launch on X and LinkedIn. In the thread, we shared the story of how we started Dub.co, the traction that we've gotten so far, and the path ahead.
We highly recommend using Typefully to schedule your launch posts – not only can you schedule your posts ahead of time, you can also do cool things like quoting the first tweet at the end of your thread.
Should I link directly to my Product Hunt page in my posts?
Yes, you should. We've heard rumors that linking directly to your Product Hunt page is bad for the algorithm, but we confirmed with the Product Hunt CEO himself that these are nothing but myths. So go ahead and link directly to your Product Hunt page in your posts.
Step 7: Track your launch with Hunted Space
The first few hours of your launch is vital – this is when you need to get as many upvotes as possible to get to the top of the leaderboard.
However, Product Hunt hides the number of upvotes for the first 4 hours to give all products a more distributed chance at exposure.
This is where a tool like Hunted Space comes in handy. Hunted Space is a real-time leaderboard for Product Hunt that shows you the number of upvotes every product has over time.
In our case, we were fortunate enough to get to 150 upvotes and 50 comments in the first hour. This was enough to get us to the top of the leaderboard, where we stayed for the rest of the day.
Step 8: Reply to every comment
One of the best ways to rise through the ranks on Product Hunt is to engage with your audience by replying to every comment on your launch post.
This is also a great opportunity to ask for feedback, answer questions, and share more about your product.
Step 9: Keep the momentum going
Throughout the day, we scheduled several updates to keep the momentum going:
- In-app & website popup: We created a subtle, dismissible popup that appeared to all users who used our app or visited our website on launch day. Go ahead, give it a try:
- Launch Banners: We created banners to celebrate our Product Hunt launch on our X profile and GitHub README.
- Launch updates: We shared updates about our launch progress on X and LinkedIn throughout the day.
- Update Slack name with short link: We updated our Slack name to include our short link –
d.to/ph– to subtly nudge our partners and friends to check out our Product Hunt launch.
- Sharing our Shoutouts on X: We shared our Shoutouts on X to give a shoutout to the products that helped us build Dub.co.
This led to retweets from all the products we gave a shoutout to, as well as the official Product Hunt X account, which gave us extra momentum throughout the day.
The results
By the end of the day, we had:
- 🗳️ 1,085 upvotes
- 💬 210 comments
- 🥇 #1 Product of the Day
- 🥇 #1 Product of the Week
- 🥇 #1 Product of the Month
We also saw a sizeable spike in traffic on our website, with over 2,000 unique visitors on launch day.
We also saw 663 new signups on launch day – an 8x increase from our daily average.
If you're thinking about launching on Product Hunt, I hope this playbook has given you some ideas on how to orchestrate a successful launch.
And if you need a link management platform to help you with your launch, we would love for you to give Dub a try – it's free to get started!
Update (Apr 1, 2024): Product of the Month
We're thrilled to announce that Dub.co has been selected as #1 Product of the Month for March 2024!
We're incredibly grateful for all the support that got us this far, and we're excited to continue building the future of link management with all of you.
