Came last on ProductHunt, still got sales!

Launched on PH, came last, but I still believe its one of the best places to get your first customers :)

On Jan 24th I randomly decided to launch my SaaS boilerplate (launchnow.pro) on Product Hunt.

Tried to push all the critical bits left, quickly documented everything I could and submitted it to PH 30 mins before 25th. Took around 2 hours for the team to verify and feature my product, and then we were live.

Unlike launches of my other two products, I did zero prep for the launch this time. No telling my friends/community for "support" or cold dms to random strangers. Sadly, literally everyone does that now, whether it's bootstrapped or funded companies, I guess there is no other way to get more upvotes. Unless you're super popular, of course.

The only prep was me making a short demo video

The results? I am last lmao

Position: #39
Upvotes: 41
Comments: 9

I did share it on my twitter, but don't have any major following there as well.

The bad

My last two launches were #4 & #3 product of the day, so of course it wasn't the best feeling.

One very stupid mistake I did was submit a post on Hackernews with the product hunt link. I assumed we can do that, but later realized that it was marked as spam and deleted. So lost any chance of getting upvotes from there.

I posted on 2 relevant Reddit communities, while the views were great (1k+) idk if I got any sales through that.

The good

As soon as my product was featured on PH. I immediately got international traffic! This is super important for me to reach folks that are not in my network whatsoever.

Launching on PH gave a very reliable backlink to my domain, and many websites scrape PH, so that boosted domain authority even further.

My first sale was from product hunt. In my other startup, Spur we listed on the Shopify app store on September 5th, 2022 and first sale was closed in 45 days. We literally regret skipping PH launch now.

The listing itself is like a checklist for you to finish all essential things before going live. While I did plan to eventually make a demo video, PH launch sped it up, and it definitely has helped with conversions.

Is PH still worth it, then?

Yes, while it's definitely much tougher to even get featured on PH now, people prepare for weeks for a launch (which imo is not worth it), and some sick folks buy votes too.

But the benefits of getting international traffic on day 1, instant SEO boost, a nice checklist to strike off before go live is good enough ROI from the efforts you put in. And you get all of this totally free of cost.

Launch on PH, do all the necessary stuff and move on!