How we got 100+ clients in 48 hours from Product Hunt

We launched our project RivalSense on Product Hunt on November 6, 2024. We did pretty well, so I wanted to share the results and some tips with the community :) And yes, we launched exactly when everyone was waiting for the US election results.

Fun fact, we wanted to launch only to get a backlink at start but since we did extremely well at the beginning of the launch, our competitive mode went on

Without wasting you time, here's the results we achieved:

Website visitors (new): 3,600
Trials started: 110
Product Hunt place: #5

At the moment (2 weeks after the launch) we have a total of 200 trials but for the sake of accuracy, we only look at the first 2 days after the PH launch (November 6 - November 8).

Product Hunt launch statistics:

Votes: 325
Comments: 57
Product of the Day: #5
Launch page: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/rivalsense

What does launching on Product Hunt do for you?

The idea of launching on Product Hunt is that all products are shown in a random order on the main page for the first 4 hours of the day. After these 4 hours pass, the products are ranked by votes for the remainder of the day.

In other words, the first 4 hours of the day are the most important thing during your PH launch. If you have not gained enough upvotes to rank on the main page after the first 4 hours, the odds are that you won't do it at all.

Main advantages of ranking Top 5 on PH:

• Channel some of Product Hunt's 3+ million monthly traffic to your website
• Get featured in PH's newsletter with 500k+ readers
• Get listed on tens of directories that copy PH's top daily products (get quite a lot of backlinks)
• Additional traffic from multiple newsletters that feature PH's top products every day (e.g., Superhuman AI, The Neuron, The Rundown AI, etc.)
• Lots of comments that are actually extremely useful feedback for further product development

How to achieve the same results?

Goal: get at least 150-200 votes during the first 4 hours. If you rank in the top 5 after the first four hours, it will be difficult to knock you off the top, since most PH visitors only check and upvote the top products on the main page.

For example, here is the final rating on the day of our launch:

1st place: 1346
2nd place: 965
3rd place: 757
4th place: 409
5th place: 325 (us)

What did we do to support the launch?

1. Leverage your network
   This is probably the most important you can do to prepare for the PH launch. RivalSense, for example, is founded by TechStars alumni so we leveraged those connections. Also, obviously, try to get all your family and friends to create an account and vote as well.

Don't be afraid to bluntly reach out to your whole LinkedIn network. If you're afraid of what they might think, remember that you're literally trying to build a company and if a connection might be "looking down on it" then its probably not worth to have them as a connection anyway.

2. Leverage any newsletters you have
   I understand that this might not be applicable to everyone but we at RivalSense have our own newsletter with almost 400 subscribers. On the day of the launch, we sent out an e-mail informing about it and asking our subscribers to give us an upvote.

3. Post on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram PH Groups
   Product Hunt Upvoters (FB)
   Startup Product Launches (FB)
   r/ProductHunters (Reddit)
   r/indiehackers (Reddit)
   r/SideProject (Reddit)
   /producthunt_heroes (Telegram)
   /ProductHuntChat (Telegram)
   /producthunt007 (Telegram)
   /PHUpvotes (Telegram)

Fair warning: many Telegram PH groups are in Russian but that shouldn't be a blocker. Just put it through Google Translate or literally copy any of the older messages and change the link to your product. I was quite surprised how active these groups are, so don't miss out on this.

Some post-mortem advice:

Prepare for a lot of useless traffic. No offense, but there are hundreds of people that will sign-up for a trial without any intention to later pay. If an additional trial has ANY costs then really rethink how to filter out that traffic. As a B2B company, the least you can do is ask for a work email.

Prepare page infrastructure so that you could see which website visitors exited in which page or which buttons are clicked the most. If you rank well on PH, this will be a big anomaly in your traffic - leverage it to later analyze and improve your website.

Respond to all of your PH comments (and honestly). People commenting are the ones who are the most interested in the product and likely have the biggest chance of converting to a paying user. Besides that, it might spark further discussion and give you even better feedback for product development.

Conclusion:

First four hours of PH is everything, give it your all.

Good luck with your PH launch!

And check out RivalSense: https://rivalsense.co/