For any startup, getting “hunted” on Product Hunt is kind of a big deal. Since it is a community of peers that recommend great products to one another, it’s not just great exposure for your company, it shows that people like what you do enough to publicly endorse it.
Geniuslink was lucky enough get posted to Product Hunt recently (big thanks to @dredurr). We won’t lie, it was something we’d been hoping would happen for a long time, but when the day came it still caught us a bit off guard. Although we didn’t make it to the home page or break any records in “upvotes,” it was a great experience. We saw a nice spike in traffic to our site, an increase in signups, and heard some great things about our service from the Product Hunt community.
Here are some lessons we learned from the experience that may help you if you’re marketing a product that you hope to see on Product Hunt someday.
1. Time is of the Essence—Have a Game Plan
As much as we had talked about how great it would be to get featured on Product Hunt, we weren’t exactly 100% prepared when it came out of nowhere early one Monday morning. Initially, there was a bit of frantic scrambling to get our team together and decide who was going to do what, and how we were going to make the most of this great opportunity.
One aspect of Product Hunt that you should be well aware of in advance is that “time since posting” is an incredibly important in their ranking algorithm. The first 24 hours are vital, so it’s imperative to have all your ducks in a row prior to getting hunted. You don’t want to waste any precious time once your post is live. We were pretty well prepared for the most part but definitely could have acted a little bit faster had we put together a more specific game plan in advance.
2. Leverage your Community
Product Hunt is all about engagement and creating a strong sense of online community. Use your relationships with clients and partners to help promote the conversation about your product. Reach out to them and let them know you’ve been hunted and encourage them to participate in the discussion. It’s great for everyone involved and really helps foster the sense of community that Product Hunt has worked so hard to create.
This is a great forum for people already familiar with your product to talk about what they like and what they’d like to see different about it. Getting them involved is the most important part! People active on Product Hunt love joining the discussion about products they use, but you need to let them know that you’ve made it. We were able to get some of our more influential clients to participate just by letting them know we’d been hunted.
3. Interact
It’s crucial that the creators of the product are active in the conversation. It’s best to have product founder or founders interact directly with their personal Product Hunt accounts, and not answer questions from the company account. This shows a human side to the product and provides a great opportunity for current and prospective customers to speak directly to the people who created it.
Answer questions, always be positive and enjoy the experience of getting to speak publicly to a community of your peers about what you have created.
4. Twitter is Your Friend
Twitter and Product Hunt play very nicely together. They are both platforms that thrive on timeliness. In addition, you can login to Product Hunt directly through your personal Twitter account, making interactions from Product Hunt to Twitter relatively seamless.
It’s an awesome channel for talking about your posting, so use relevant hashtags and tweet like crazy about it to help spread the word. You can even tweet comments from your posting with one click directly from Product Hunt.
5. Offer Exclusive Incentives
Finally, help capitalize on the experience of getting hunted by offering incentives through exclusive offers to people who found you through Product Hunt. Make it special and meaningful. Your product only gets posted once, so offering incentives for people to sign up after discovering your posting helps motivate them to try out your product while you’ve captured their attention. Product Hunt encourages this and it helps add another element of excitement about your product and the community.
Have Fun!
If you get featured on Product Hunt, the most important thing is to enjoy the experience. Someone posted you to Product Hunt because they think your product is awesome and want to share it with their peers. As product creators, this is a reward in itself! Embrace the conversation and the Product Hunt community.
Taking note of some of the things we at Geniuslink learned after getting hunted can help you take full advantage of this incredible opportunity to spread the word about the amazing product you’ve created.
Cheers,
Team Geniuslink