Why getting to the top 5 on Product Hunt was important to me
Product Hunt. The holy grail of the tech world. Everyone wants to be #1. I also bought into the hype, figured I’d give it my best shot and see what happens.
My product is a Google Chrome extension called askBelynda that helps consumers find and buy sustainable products while they’re shopping online. The climate crisis is real and this is my way of helping reduce carbon footprint one purchase at a time.
There aren’t enough green tech products on Product Hunt. So much so that Climate Tech is a subcategory of Nature & Outdoor and not a category of its own. And the best products there all have to do with Teslas.
Back to launching on Product Hunt, there are many blogs and articles out there on how to prep and what to do. I would suggest buying this checklist. It gives you all the info you need and if you follow it and have enough connections in advance you’ll be fine.
I run my own startup. Except for the Marketing that I’ve recently outsourced I practically do everything. From coding to company vetting to now reaching out to angel investors. It’s all on me. So when I decided to launch on Product Hunt I knew it was going to take a lot of effort on my end but I also decided not to go all crazy about it. Here’s my launch page on Product Hunt and launch video below.
So what was my purpose? Exposure. I want more people to know about askBelynda, download the extension, use it and make better, more sustainable buying choices.
Leading up to the launch date they say you should have 100 people on your contact list. I had 33. But I had the right 33. Friends that would upvote and comment immediately. Influencers that would bring in more people and people that recently launched on their own and knew how difficult it was.
I live in Denver, CO and so the scheduled 12:01 Pacific time was 1:01 am for me.
I started strong, immediately in the fifth place and even Product Wars was predicting I would be in fourth place. It helped that a lot of my contacts are from Israel and India where it’s the convenient hour of 10:00 am and 12:30 pm respectively.
There were a lot of ups and downs. I was in fifth place most of the time. There was a short dip to 6th and then 7th place at my 9:30 am and then I reached out to the Telegram, Twitter and Slack groups I recently joined that were mainly in the U.S. Their support got me back to fifth. The products immediately before and after mine were very very close the whole time so I was tracking the progress all the time.
I barely slept. I had maybe 2 breaks of an hour sleep each. This is not for the faint of heart :)
I updated on Twitter all the time. In hindsight if there’s something I should have done better before the launch was create a larger following there. It seems that the social platform of choice for Product Hunt is Twitter.
The last hour was the most exciting. I was looking pretty solid for the 5th place. Product Hunt already changed the #5 to their ‘Product of the day’ 5th badge on my page. I kept tracking the one right after me to see that they won’t catch up. The top 10 get a mention in the daily email the next day but the top 5 get a badge.
10 minutes to the end a contact I had on my list upvoted and commented and I guess he has a lot of followers because in 5 minutes I must have gotten 20 more upvotes and all of a sudden, 3 minutes to the end, I was at fourth place. It was so surprising! It was so close to the end that the daily email the next day still has the previous order.
In conclusion, did I achieve my goal? Definitely. Was it worth it? Yes. Will I ever do this again? Absolutely not.
If you are launching on Product Hunt and want to consult on anything, feel free to reach out.
