Introduction - This is for founders

This article is a guide for founders who want to launch on Product Hunt and win product of the day.

In December 2024, we launched Stackfix on Product Hunt and achieved:

• #1 Product of the Day
• #1 Product of the Week
• #1 AI Product of the Week
• #1 SaaS Product of the Month
• 1,200+ upvotes

This article shares our launch playbook: what worked, what to avoid, and our actions to achieve these results.

The actions to avoid when launching on Product Hunt are just as important. If you want to have a great launch, you will probably face temptations that could kill your launch.

On the same week as we launched, I saw at least two products falling to these temptations. Both suffered big penalties that caused them to lose product of the day and product of the week.

I'll tell you how to avoid these dangers, and recommend the actions that helped us win Product of the Week.

Our launch:

This post will be our blueprint for future launches, and I intend it to help you as well.

I've included a few extra parts at the end, including my recommended launch timeline, summarizing how to schedule your launch preparation.

Now, let's start preparing for your launch to win Product of the Day.

Pre-prep: speak to someone much more knowledgeable than you

A great early decision by Paddy (our CEO) was arranging calls with Chris Messina.

We spoke to Chris for two sessions, and he gave us some very useful guidance from his experience being the top hunter on Product Hunt and hunting hundreds of products.

This cost money, but was worth it. Speaking to someone who can give you advice tailored to your product can save you a load of time and boost your performance.

This post builds on Chris's advice combined with our experience. I hope that the guide gives you everything you need. But, if you can, arrange to speak to someone experienced to give you specific advice for your product.

As MrBeast says, "Knowledge is so OP".

Set your launch date and teaser page 3 weeks in advance

I recommend setting up your teaser page and setting your launch date 3 weeks in advance because there are important actions that you must sequence in advance.

I'll describe the actions to sequence, like building your supporter list, in more detail later. But almost everyone is busy, so your launch won't go well if you give them short notice to support your launch.

Also, to have a reasonable chance of getting product of the day, you need to win the first four hours (again, I'll explain later). Unless you've got a huge and highly engaged following, winning the first four hours requires building your supporter list in advance with your teaser page.

Your teaser page can be basic because its main purpose is to act as a form for interested people to click to become a supporter. This is crucial for 'winning your first four hours' because Product Hunt will send that person an email on the day of your launch, mentioning your launch.

Regarding how basic your teaser page can be, our teaser page was simply a solid background with our logo on it.

Next up: Start creating your launch post

Below is our launch post. I've highlighted the different sections to give you a clear idea of each section I refer to.

I'll go through each section below and give my recommendations on what to include, and what to avoid.

1. Add a clear and short headline

Headlines are critical. People use them to decide whether to continue reading.

Just like with making YouTube videos or email marketing, you want to tell the reader if it's worth them investing their time in continuing to engage. To maximize your click-through, you need an appealing short title (otherwise known as a 'a promise'), which you then deliver on.

Short titles are generally much better. For our headline, we considered variants of "Compare software in seconds with AI" and "Instant software comparisons, powered by AI," but then settled on the shorter and clearer "Compare software in seconds."

We might have improved this—I can see how we could get closer to our value proposition of finding the best software for people with full pricing. But "Compare software in seconds" was short and clear.

The key elements of your headline:

1. Short
2. States your product's most useful benefit
3. Easy to read

Here are other examples of good launch page headlines:

2. Add your description

Similar to your headline, this should list a few more key benefits. I'd recommend focusing on benefits rather than features.

Benefits explain why a feature matters to the user (e.g., "saves time" or "reduces stress"), focusing on the value or outcome. Features describe what the product does that give the benefit (e.g., "automated scheduling" or "hourly backups").

So, here's what we wrote for our description. We could have made the benefits clearer by being more succinct, but it was good enough.

Some other good examples:

Fathom's headline and description:

Amie's headline and description:

3. Add maker shoutouts

I think this section is of low importance. But I'd still recommend filling it out to add more interest to your launch pages.

Here's a good moment to show the tools that you use. We are big users of AI tools (and enjoy the productivity gains), so we included some of them and our infrastructure

Like I said, what you write is of low importance, but I'd recommend filing it out to give more color to your company.

Here's what we wrote:

4. Add your maker comment:

Your maker comment is important. This is the first comment that users will see. It typically involves one of the founders introducing themselves and your product.

I'd recommend that follow the below structure when writing your maker's comment, which is:

1. Who are you? Give a brief introduction, mention some social credibility if you can. For our launch, Paddy mentioned that he previously sold his company to TikTok.

   With typical modesty, Paddy initially wanted to avoid mentioning his previous successful exit. But social proof and credibility are powerful. This is the moment to show social evidence of your competence, such as selling a previous company, a recent fundraise, or other relevant experience.

2. What is the problem you're solving? The approach I use is:

   1. What's the problem and for whom?
   2. What's your solution?
   3. What's the impact of your ideal solution?

3. List the key benefits of your solution. I'd include 3-4 key benefits.

4. Bonus: Mention your revenue model / how you'll sustain your product.

   To build more trust, it's a good idea to mention how you make money if it's not entirely clear. For our launch, we mentioned in our maker comment that we have no paid tier, nor can companies pay to promote their products. In contrast, we make money via affiliate links when someone clicks to visit or buy a product.

In essence, here's a rough template for writing your Product Hunt maker's comment:

• Intro
• Problem
• Why existing solutions don't work
• Why now?
• Solution + Why you?
• Benefit 1
• Benefit 2
• Benefit 3
• Benefit 4
• Social proof
• Thanks, any special offer, and outro

Here's our full maker comment from Paddy:

Here are other good examples:

From Remento:

From Fathom:

5. Add media to your gallery

Your gallery's aim is to:

1. interest the reader by providing eye-catching visuals, and
2. communicate information about what your product does visually.

Important note: Remember that most visitors won't click to expand each image in your gallery. So each image's elements need to be readable from the minimized gallery. (I follow the same approach when creating YouTube thumbnails.)

For your gallery, I recommend that you add:

1. A video from a founder demoing the product
2. 'Benefit and hint' slides (~4-5 slides)

Here's our launch's gallery:

1. Adding your video from a founder

Paddy did a good job for us, but we were low on time here (Paddy filmed it at 6:30am before our launch at 8am!).

Regarding how much effort to invest into the video: Do you emphasize authenticity without much editorial polish (which we went for) or do you want a highly refined video?

I recommend authenticity because it's faster and more personal. For us, our "sleepy but energized founder" aesthetic did the job.

In retrospect, we could have improved our video and kept authenticity, but you can have an outstanding launch without a highly polished video.

For example, here's Wordware's launch with a basic, authentic video, and filmed on a laptop using ScreenStudio. They won Product of the Year with over 7.7k upvotes.

So, I'd recommend filming a simple product demo video and not spending much time editing it.

2. Adding your 'benefit and hint' slides

These images in your gallery should include cover each of the key benefits that you mentioned of your maker comment. Our 'benefit and hint' slides: I call these the 'benefit and hint' slides because I think of their role as being to:

a) mention your product's key benefits in text, and

b) include a visual hint about how your product achieves the benefit.

A simple way to add this visual hint is to show some of your UI.

To be clear, these shouldn't be actual screenshots. It's much better to use parts of your UI or mockups to visually highlight certain elements. This is what we did.

Your aim with your slides is to focus your visitors on your product's benefits.

Also, each visitor will first see your gallery media in an unexpanded format. Using segments of your products makes it easier for you to convey key benefits in these smaller previews.

Here's one of the 'benefit and hint' slides we used for our launch.

Our benefit here is that we allow customers to "compare live prices" of all the products we cover. Our hint is a part of the pricing comparison table UI that our product uses.

Add extra cohesion

A neat way for you to add more cohesion to your launch here (which we slightly deviated from) is to repeat the key benefit points that you stated in your maker comment.

This adds a nice connection between the different parts of your launch post.

Here's Fathom's launch linking benefit and hint slides to their maker's comment.

See the repeated, neat pattern:

• Their "Just click to highlight" slide matches their key benefit point of "Just click".
• Their "Instant access to your transcribed recording and highlight moments" slide matches their "Instant Access" key benefit point. and so on.

Don't bother with GIF animations

Some people like adding GIFs to their gallery. Chris recommended against that on the basis that GIFs can be distracting. My opinion is that GIFs offer marginal benefit here for significantly extra time cost. We didn't use any GIFs. I'd recommend spending more time on other elements of your launch instead.

Prepare your team

Think of your team as your product's ambassadors on Product Hunt. This is because Product Hunt is a community first, marketplace second — authenticity is valuable. Product Hunt visitors want to see the humans behind the product, not just the product itself.

You should aim to ensure that each maker has some Product Hunt points beforehand. This tells Product Hunt's anti-bot system that you're not a bot, and adds some more personality for fellow human visitors about you.

If there's enough time, a subset of your team could do another mini-launch, which Camin did here, launching one of his personal products with a few others in the team for fun and more credibility in the Product Hunt community.

Why you should follow the conventional Product Hunt format for your launch page

Like all social media channels (and most social interactions with humans), Product Hunt follows a format.

Visitors have expectations of how you should present yourself on Product Hunt. Turning up to a formal dinner in pajamas might be you expressing yourself, but will confuse everyone there.

Similarly, there's a visual dress code to follow in your launch page that Product Hunt users expect.

Follow this. Innovate in your product, rather than confusing Product Hunt visitors by ignoring their visual expectations.

Alex Hormozi on different formats for different platforms: (Source: $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers To Want To Buy Your Stuff)

Give yourself the time to mobilize supporters

To raise $100,000 on Kickstarter, you need to bring $30,000 from friends and family. Product Hunt is a similar game. For you to rank in the top 3, you need to motivate your audience and community to visit your page on launch day and support.

As of now, to get product of the day with very high confidence, you need 1k upvotes on the day. To get product of the month with very high confidence, you need around 2k upvotes. Check out hunted.space to get a sense of the upvotes you'd need to win product of the Day/week/month as of the time that you're reading this.

So, getting these upvotes is why it's important to start multiple weeks in advance. Unless you have a large and highly engaged audience, it will be very difficult to bring hundreds of supporters to your page in just a few days.

But you can bring hundreds of people who will support you if you work at it over time (particularly if you're working with a team).

I know because we did this with warm outreach — calling and messaging everyone we knew who might be interested, and asking them to support.

Focus on warm outreach

Unless you have a large audience that you've already built, I'd recommend that you focus on warm outreach for your Product Hunt launch. As far as I know, every single person we contacted, and we contacted many hundreds, was a person that we knew. We did no cold outreach.

Warm outreach is better because:

1. Warm outreach is more efficient for getting support for your launch. People who know you are much more likely to support you, so you get more support per time you spend.
2. Warm outreach isn't spam. This means your message won't be perceived as spam or unwanted solicitation
3. Warm outreach builds your existing relationships, rather than potentially damaging them. I enjoy hearing from people I know about what they are doing, particularly when they are building something interesting. Similarly, sending a message about your launch to people who are interested in you or the product actually strengthens your network. I enjoyed letting people know about what we were launching at Stackfix, and people responded positively.

How we did our warm outreach

1. We created a Google sheet of our combined relevant contacts. These came from LinkedIn, Telegram, WhatsApp, phone, etc.,
2. In the 5-10 days before our launch, we sent each person a brief message asking if they'd be happy to support our launch by clicking "notify me" on our teaser page and then visiting our launch page to support us on the day.
3. We kept a record on our Google Sheet about whether the person had responded to say they would support or had supported.
4. We followed up (but not to the point of spamming people).

Here's an example of our Google Sheet tracking our warm outreach:

Side note: you can't see who supported you on Product Hunt

This seemed frustrating to us, but is actually useful anti-spam protection from Product Hunt.

As we experienced, anyone who is listed on a launch page will likely get cold messages from launch parasites asking for upvotes. So Product Hunt minimizes this by just showing 20 or so of your followers and upvoting people.

Don't bother posting to public communities as a stranger

Some people advised us to post in online product hunt communities, such as Reddit or Slack channels. But, I'd recommend that you don't bother with that; unless you have built a following on those channels, it's a waste of time. As Chris also said, there's a negligible gain from doing this.

Against my point, we didn't try this approach of posting in communities asking people to support us. So I have no primary experience of this. But logically, it seems like a waste of your time. If you post as a stranger to other strangers, why would they spend their time to support your product unless you're offering them some value?

Don't swap Product Hunt votes

Once you have an upcoming launch, you're going to get loads of people messaging you with the intention of swapping Product Hunt votes.

I wouldn't do this. Don't upvote a product unless you are actually interested in it. It just degrades the system.

Even if it worked, you'd need hundreds of individual agreements with other people to swap votes. This seems like a lot of effort for low reward.

We never did this, so I have no first-hand experience of whether it is effective.

But this behavior is also against your interests, conceptually. If you degrade Product Hunt's reputation (by vote-swapping) to win an award from Product Hunt that relies on Product Hunt having a great reputation, you are destroying the credibility of the award you're trying to win. You would be sawing off the branch you're sitting on.

And, vote-swapping seems like an inefficient use of time for getting support. Reaching out to people that are actually interested in you or your product seems like a much more efficient way to get support on Product Hunt.

Don't buy Product Hunt votes (Danger!)

The most dangerous thing for your Product Hunt launch is to buy votes. This is the most important thing for you to avoid doing for your launch.

Just like Chris warned us as we were setting up our launch, as soon as you list your product as launching on Product Hunt, you will almost certainly get people contacting you offering upvotes for money.

Across our small team, we probably had over a hundred different vote-sellers contact us across LinkedIn and email - all offering us upvotes for cash.

We ignored them all, and here's why it's critical for your launch to avoid buying upvotes as well.

Here are some examples of paid upvotes offers I got:

Reason 1: Buying Product Hunt upvotes won't work

The first reason to avoid buying Product Hunt votes is: it won't work.

For Product Hunt to exist as a business, it needs to show actually interesting products to visitors.

So, Product Hunt's entire business model depends on showing products in which people are interested, and avoiding being gamed to show products that are uninteresting.

As a result, Product Hunt's anti-bot and anti-spam mechanisms are very effective; their business depends on it. This means that vote-sellers are highly unlikely to beat the Product Hunt system. If the vote-sellers win often enough, Product Hunt would be useless.

Given that Product Hunt does recommend interesting products today - rather than uninteresting products that have bought votes - it stands that Product Hunt's anti-bot protections are continuing to win the anti-vote buying war.

This means that you shouldn't bother trying to defeat Product Hunt by buying votes.

Even excluding the penalties of cheating that I'll mention next, don't buy upvotes because it won't work. It's so much more time-efficient for your launch to focus on reaching out to people who might support you, and who are interested in your product because of its functionality, rather than trying to cheat Product Hunt.

Ask yourself: Do I want fake support from bots who'll never buy my product, or real support from humans who might.

Reason 2: Buying Product Hunt upvotes could ruin your launch

The second reason to avoid buying Product Hunt votes is: Product Hunt will punish you.

Because Product Hunt's business depends on winning the anti-bot war, as I just mentioned, it is effective at detecting cheats and penalizing them.

Here are some examples of products that thought that they could game Product Hunt and got punished:

Crude attempt punished

See this massive increase. It's obviously a load of bots upvoting the product. Product Hunt has sophisticated ways of detecting bots, but here is a way which is extremely unsophisticated. Look at that line, just shooting up. And then being severely penalized.

Source

Sophisticated attempt punished

We got Product of the Day for 3 December. We were on course for Product of the Week. But then we saw ACE Studio gradually creeping up on us. I was a bit surprised at how popular they were given how restrictive their free trial was.

And then, ACE Studio suddenly lost 400 votes. Product Hunt had presumably detected 400 spam or purchased upvotes. ACE Studio plummeted, dropping out of the top five for the month, and might even have suffered consequences for the day.

Here's another example from 4 December (the day after our launch) where three products were in fierce competition throughout the day. See the sharp declines, particularly for the yellow line:

In short, don't buy votes from people on the internet, Product Hunt will likely detect it and likely penalize you.

Note — You will get corrections even if you're not cheating

On the day, even if you're not buying votes or otherwise trying to cheat Product Hunt, you will probably have some votes deducted from you periodically.

Here's an example of our chart. See the arrows I added to the periodic deductions of votes on our upvote chart. You can also see there are waves where both us and other products had simultaneous deductions.

We don't know why these deductions happened. My theory is that there are bot accounts that upvote-sellers are directing to vote on different products to build up a realistic-looking voting patterns to sell later. Product Hunt then detects and prunes these fake upvotes.

We don't know, but I'd recommend seeing these periodic corrections as further evidence that it's a waste of time to try to cheat Product Hunt with fake votes.

It's a much better use of your time to seek interest from real people. After all, Product Hunt bots are not going to buy your product.

Win the first 4 hours — Build your Product Hunt followers list

To have a good chance of winning product of the day, it's very important to win the first 4 hours.

The way that Product Hunt works is that for the first four hours of the new day—and the day starts at 8 a.m. UK time, 12 a.m. PST—Product Hunt will:

i) show the products that are launching that day randomly at the top and rotate them, and

ii) hide each product's upvote count.

This is great because it allows people to vote for products without influence. In the first four hours, all products get equal airtime as the top five products that new users see. That prevents a single product from dominating simply because that product happened to be at the top.

But once those four hours are up, the products with the top votes are placed into the top five.

So it's highly important that in those first four hours, you get in the top 4 - preferably first. If you're not in the top five after the first four hours, you'll have a significant disadvantage because any person visiting the site will not see you in the top five, meaning that you'll get far fewer organic votes.

You really need to get in that top four products. Consequently, you need to be very active from the start of the day.

This is where doing your work in advance pays off.

Everyone who clicked "notify me" on your teaser page becomes a follower of your product. This means that they will then get an email as soon as the day starts and can go straight to your launch to see your page, and hopefully upvote.

This greatly increases your chance of getting into the top five by the time the votes become public four hours later.

So, this is important. We did that, and we were in the top five after the first four hours of our launch.

One future bonus is that your follower list can compound over time. Everyone who clicks 'notify me' to become a follower becomes a follow for your future Product Hunt. This means that your Product Hunt audience who will receive notifications on launch day can grow over time.

On launch day: Reach out to supporter list

On launch day, it's time to outreach. Your first aim is to win the first 4 hours as mentioned above.

Action: Contact everyone again on your list to:

1. ask them to visit your page to support, emphasizing that today is the day!
2. confirm if they've visited/supported

Based on the response, you could follow up several hours later. The style of this message should be short and courteous as usual, with a clear request

Here's an example of the follow-up message I sent to someone who had agreed to support us earlier:

Hi Brian. We've launched Stackfix on Product Hunt today!

As you kindly offered, would you support us on PH today? (It must be today to count)

Link to support: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/stackfix

This is

1. short
2. clear
3. a reminder of the person's previous kind offer - giving them the ability to help and to check out our product which may interest them.

Given the importance of winning the first 4 hours, another small recommendation is to start your launch-day-outreach with contacts you think are long-time Product Hunt users. This is something that Paddy did for us.

This is because your contacts who are already Product Hunt users will be more likely to visit your Product Hunt and support you; they are already familiar with the launch process.

An extra reason for doing this is unequal vote weighting. While we don't have direct evidence for this, it makes sense that Product Hunt would upweight support from long-term, active members of the Product Hunt community. Conversely, you'd expect Product Hunt to downweight support from people who have just signed up.

But, more important than both of these points is simply to reach out to everyone on your contacts list again, starting with the people who've already agreed to check out your page. Now is the time to call in those promises, and let the people who might be interested in your product actually see your product!

And then, hopefully obviously, also share your launch on socials or however you're reaching your audience.

Remember - assuming that your product is useful to someone - not messaging people about your product actually deprives them of the chance to gain something valuable.

If your product is good, you have a moral duty to message people about it.

On launch day: reply to comments

On launch day, you should reply to every comment. This is something that worked really well for us.

We replied to every comment throughout the day, which demonstrates our engagement and personalities to visitors, making our launch page much richer, and prompting more people to visit our product.

This began with replying to the first comment from Chris, our hunter.

We got many questions and comments. All of us in the team were standing by to reply whenever Product Hunt released the new batch of comments.

I think replying to these comments thoughtfully gave a clear impression of us at Stackfix.

Also, it was nice that everyone in our small team was replying to comments on Product Hunt. This gave everyone visiting our launch a good sense of our people behind the product, rather than if just one person had replied.

Another recommendation: reply throughout the day, not just in batches.

It's fun to ask questions, particularly if you know you'll get an answer. Once other Product Hunt visitors see that you are replying to every question, they're much more likely to leave a question as well. And so the virtuous cycle of comments and interesting questions continues.

Optional bonus: Get hunted by a prominent Product Hunt hunter

This was helpful, but not essential.

As with getting any prominent person's recommendation, being hunted by a prominent Product Hunt hunter gave us some social proof. We were kindly hunted by Chris, which he chose to do following our conversation (and which he doesn't always do) because he liked our product.

Being hunted by someone is social proof that a prominent hunter has liked what they've seen. But I sense that it's less powerful than you might think. Chris has hunted many products — being the #1 hunter on Product Hunt — but the mere fact of his endorsement hasn't meant that they've all done well.

Chris's advice was very helpful to us, and I've already recommended getting advice from an expert. But being hunted by someone prominent is an optional extra and is insufficient alone for you to do a great launch.

Conclusion

Based on our experience winning product of the day and product of the week, the 3 principles of a successful Product Hunt launch are:

1. Preparation: Start the basics 3 weeks before launch, such as starting to build your supporter base through warm outreach

2. Authenticity: Focus on genuine engagement. Avoid any temptation to game the system

3. Engagement on the day: Win the first 4 hours, then maintain momentum by continuing to do warm outreach and engaging with people generally, such as by replying to Product Hunt comments.

Further reading:

• Product Hunt's launch guide.

Addendum

Thanks

Big thanks to Paddy and to Camin for carefully reading this guide and providing typically incisive comments.