How I was #1 on Product Hunt for 18 hours, and then finished 2nd

Indie Hackers Exclusive
👉 not sharing this with anyone else for at least a week

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If you're a regular PH visitor, perhaps you've seen my product launch on Friday. It's called "Maker Swipe File", a free collection of 100+ tweets to grow your audience.

This is the story of how I was #1 from start to finish, take away the "finish".

I'll be sharing the things me and my partner did right, and the things we did wrong or that didn't go as planned. Kind of a SWOT analysis of our PH if you will 😂

Here we go!

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First of all, facts & numbers 📈.

• We launched on Friday July 2nd, 00:02am PST
• Our product is free and targeted at makers
• We were hunted by top hunter @5harath
• 503 upvotes on launch day
• 124 comments on launch day
• 802 downloads on launch day
• Quickly rose to #1 spot, only to finish #2 about 3-4 hours before the end
• This is not our first launch, we had already reached #3 with a similar product focused on Reddit

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What we did right 💪

Pre-launch our product: a few days before the PH launch, we talked about our product publicly on Twitter and in more private communities. Overall, we got about 40 people download our product. People we were able to sollicite on launch day.

Make quality Product Hunt assets + landing page: We made our assets using Figma (and a free online tool to make GIFs ^^) and our landing page using Carrd. We tried to keep it really simple in terms of user flow, while doing something clean enough for it to look professional. The "official" Gumroad button on the landing page really increases conversion rate in my opinion.

Finding a top hunter: our hunter was happy to help us, and though I don't believe this plays a direct role in bringing in traffic, people who trust the hunter when visiting the PH product page will be more likely to support it.

Leverage Twitter: I had about 700 followers on Twitter (say hi 👋), and my co-founder has 4K. On launch day, we did a lot of stuff on Twitter, including:

• reaching out in DM to people we know well
• announcing the launch
• keeping people engaged all day by posting screenshots of where we are at
• doing a giveaway (in exchange for RT + get the product)
• thanking people as they upvote us on PH

I can't know for sure (PH doesn't give the stats), but I'm convinced Twitter was absolutely huge for us. Perhaps 50%+ of our upvotes.

Leverage our email community: My co-maker and I created a product studio called Pony Express. Every week, we share 3 products for makers and creators in our newsletter (most of which have been made by other makers), and we have about 2500 subscribers now.

And it turns out we send out newsletters on Fridays! So we added a small intro to the newsletter to talk about our launch.

As I told you early on in the post, we had already launched a similar product for Reddit a few weeks back. So we also had all these people's emails and told them we launched the same thing for Twitter.

Interacting with people on the page: a lot of founders / makers don't know how important comments are for Product Hunt. So keeping the conversation going, showing that you're really there to answer people's questions or thank them, this is key.

Where we got lucky 🍀

Top upvoters: upvotes are not votes, all aren't equal. Product Hunt uses an algorithm to score the value of each upvote. If you're a regular PH user, active in the community, your upvote will be worth a lot. If you just signed up, it's actually worthless (or so they say). So we got lucky to get a few big accounts upvote our product.

Just to prove my point: our competitor for the day (who did end up being #1), was still behind us even though they had 60 more upvotes than we did.

What didn't go as planned 🎢

Having to change our product name during the launch: sooo turns out your product name can't be too similar to a description. Our initial name was "100+ tweets to grow your audience", which indeed isn't very branded ^^. But nobody told us anything, so we launched with that name.

About 20min later, PH moderators changed our name to Tweet Hunter (which is a tool we made and used to make the free resource we were launching). Thing is, we want to launch Tweet Hunter on PH in a few weeks or months, and you can't launch twice on PH (except for huge updates).

So we quickly used the PH chat module to contact moderators, and offered to rename us "Maker Swipe File" which was accepted.

This was not fun for us, because we had sent out a bunch of communications saying "find us on the PH homepage under the name [X]"... We had to do some damage control, but it's likely that a few people didn't find us because of this.

The mistakes we made 😡

Broken link in email: one of the emails I sent out had a broken link. Fortunately, there were 2 links in the email and 1 of them worked. Anyway, never forget to check your links (I actually thought I did, but maybe I didn't).

Not having a network in the US: we don't yet know a lot of people in the US. Turns out our competitor for 1st place is US-based and quite a big startup (for us, big = you have employees 😂). Clearly they were able to bring in much more traffic throughout the day, and even more so when it was night time for us. I went to bed at #1 spot and 60 upvotes less (yes, less) than our competitor. Woke up #2 with 150 upvotes less.

Lesson 👉 never think it's over just because you've been #1 for a while. Especially if most of your marketing efforts are behind you, and you're not well connected in the US.

What we should have done, even with a limited US network, is schedule tweets & emails in the middle of the night for us to try and keep the momentum. Maybe segmenting our email lists based on location would have been smart.

Keep fishing for support after download: we did end up adding a CTA to our thank you email asking people to support us on PH, but that was hours after the launch and we didn't have time to think about how to do it right. The fact is we got 802 downloads and 503 upvotes. So there's about 300 people who got the resource but chose not to support us. Maybe a little extra nudge early on could have made a difference.

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That's it for now. As you can see, our launch took quite a lot of effort, but not so much planning. However, I think it's important to understand a lot of the sympathy we got was tied to our product being free and for makers.

You should probably plan a lot more if your product is paid and possibly aiming for a larger audience than "just" makers.

If you found this useful (which I hope you did), I share similar stuff on my Twitter account. Send me DM if you want to talk about anything!