On June 30, 2024, we launched on Product Hunt and became the #1 Product of the Day. This was a huge win for us, giving us a lot of exposure and introducing us to many new users.
But this wasn’t an easy road.
We’ve launched on Product Hunt a lot (26 times, to be exact). From launching Codementor, our first Product Hunt launch in 2014, to releasing Arc 3.0, our newest product, we’ve learned a lot.
In this Product Hunt launch guide, we share how we finally made it happen — and how you can do it, too.
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Why Does Product Hunt Matter?
You probably already know this, but Product Hunt is the ultimate launchpad for tech startups, where users can not only showcase new products, apps, books, and services but also vote on them. And the most popular products get featured, boosting their visibility and attracting early adopters.
But here’s the catch: of around 270 new and exciting products launching every month, only 28 make it to the top. So far, the repertoire of successful Product Hunt launches includes big tech companies like Slack, Notion, Zapier, Loom, and Robinhood.
We launched Arc 3.0 on Product Hunt in June 2024. With it, we expanded our product to include marketers and designers after 10 years of focusing on developers. This exciting milestone led us to become the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, and we’re excited to share our journey.
How We Prepared for Our Launch
To win on Product Hunt, you need a solid plan and at least two months of prep work. Though there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to making your product launch successful, here are four basic steps that helped us secure the top spot:
- Create engaging, high-quality images and compelling videos that showcase your product. High-quality visuals attract attention and make your product stand out.
- Build excitement about your upcoming launch in the Product Hunt community with sneak peeks and teasers. Engaging with your target audience early can help you build anticipation and gather support.
- Only use established accounts in your existing network for voting. Encourage your supporters to use older, active accounts because newly created accounts could be flagged by the Product Hunt algorithm.
- Engage influencers to boost your visibility. Reach out to the right influencers who can promote your product and amplify your reach to all global community members.
Research Your Audience
Here’s what you can do in the weeks leading to your new Product Hunt launch:
- Start with a soft rollout or beta test to gauge demand, gather valuable feedback, and gain pre-launch momentum.
- Listen closely to your target audience — Are they asking for new features? Are there needs your product isn’t addressing?
- Use all insights you gather to finetune your offering and make sure that your product truly excites them.
We also followed these steps earlier this year. After a soft rollout of Arc 3.0, we gathered feedback and assessed demand. What we learned was that companies want to build flexible global teams with not just developers but also marketers and designers.
So, on the launch day, we highlighted our role as a global matchmaker, connecting top remote talent with companies worldwide and showing how we match companies with the world’s best talent across time zones.
Get Expert Advice
Getting expert advice from Product Hunt veterans is always a good move. By talking to people who have successfully launched on Product Hunt, you can find great tips to boost your chances of success.
That’s exactly what we did.
We’d launched on Product Hunt 26 times before using the knowledge we gathered from every guide out there, but to no avail — we could only reach the Top 4 spot at best.
This time around, we had a breakthrough. We researched the top products of the year and noticed a common trend: many of these products were hunted by Chris Messina, Ben Lang, Michael Seibel, and Rogan Chaubey.
So, Chris Bakke, founder of Laskie (acquired by X) and a friend of Arc, encouraged us to talk to the top #1 Product Hunt hunter, Chris Messina.
He gave us some great tips:
- Launch on a Sunday for a better shot at #1, but go for weekdays if your goal is to attract the most traffic.
- Set up a teaser page to gather followers before the launch.
- Get Arc’s community of 300K+ developers ready to support us on launch day.
Build a Great Product Page
To make a great first impression, your product page needs to look amazing, highlighting your value proposition.
Product pages with demos tend to perform better, so consider investing in polished visuals and a professional video rather than a simple demo. This investment can make a big difference in how your product is perceived.
Since product pages with demos perform better, we initially thought of creating a simple Loom demo to make our product stand out. However, when we saw that the top products had polished videos, we decided to step it up and hire a freelance animator. This was a $770 investment — our largest spend on this campaign.
The rest of the images were created by our internal design team, with a focus on eye-catching visuals.
Engage the Product Hunt Community
Early engagement with the Product Hunt community is critical to building excitement and gaining support for your product. Here are some tips to get you started:
- Share sneak peeks and teasers to build anticipation.
- Attend meetups or events to connect with other makers and gain their support.
- Use established accounts for voting, as the algorithm values older and more active accounts. Accounts with a 365-day streak are said to count 10x.
- Feature other launched products to leverage established accounts.
- Plan ahead and involve your team to build a strong community presence.
In the weeks leading up to our successful Product Hunt launch, we started engaging with both Arc and Product Hunt communities early. We shared sneak peeks and teasers to build excitement and attended a Product Hunt meetup in Taipei, where we pitched Arc 3.0 to 30 makers who pledged their support.
With hundreds of products being launched at the time, we knew we couldn’t do it alone. So, our main goal was to get help from strong accounts, especially those who had launched before and were motivated to assist.
Prepare Your Team
A successful launch isn’t a one-person show. You need your team to come together.
Create a fun challenge or initiative to get everyone involved. Assign specific roles and tasks to keep the momentum going and make sure that everyone is working toward the same goal.
That’s exactly what we did: We created an internal Arc Team Challenge, and the response from our team was amazing!
Twelve team members stepped up to connect with makers of the top 10 Products of the Day via LinkedIn every day for one month and offered support for their product launches.
Most makers would reply: “Thank you! Happy to return the favor.” Then, we’d send them the link to our teaser page.
We used a simple tracker with every maker’s name and LinkedIn profile so that we could follow up on launch day. Needless to say, our team was ready to make a splash.
Creating Our Product Hunt Submission
Use the Right Tagline and Description
To make your product stand out and gain early traction, focus on creating a strong tagline and description. These three steps will help you with that:
- Create clear, catchy messaging that captures your mission.
- Develop a solid tagline to immediately convey what your product does and how it benefits users.
- Ensure that your description highlights your product’s unique features and benefits, showing how it addresses the needs of your target audience.
For our Product Hunt launch submission, we developed clear messaging led by the tagline “Your remote job matchmaker.” It captured our mission to connect job seekers with remote jobs and help companies build strong, flexible teams.
Also, our description highlighted Arc’s unique features, showing how it can help both companies and job seekers find the perfect match with developers, marketers, and designers.
Choose the Right Categories and Tags
By selecting the right categories and tags, you are guaranteed to reach your target Product Hunt users. Make sure to pick those that align with the purpose of your product and the interests of your potential audience. This will help ensure that the right people discover your product.
Before our launch, we picked only the most relevant categories and tags to make sure that our product would be discovered by users interested in hiring, remote work, and careers.
Time Your Launch Correctly
Timing your launch strategically is key to success.
To drive traffic, launch on a weekday when your audience is most active. But if you’re vying for the top spot, launch on a weekend when there’s less competition.
Whichever option you choose, remember to build momentum early. Setting up a teaser landing page well in advance helps gather support and generate excitement before your launch.
For our launch, we aimed for the top spot. So, we set up a teaser page a month in advance to get support first and then launched on a Sunday. This helped us build momentum, ensuring that we had a strong showing right from the start.
Looking for top talent fast? See how Arc can help you:
⚡️ Find developers, designers, marketers, and more
⚡️ Freelance or full-time remote + fully vetted
⚡️ Save up to 58% with global hires
Hire top talent with Arc risk-free →
Launch Day Strategy
Coordinate and Engage To Streamline Votes
To keep the votes consistent throughout the day, you need to be strategic.
Product Hunt might flag any steep peaks in votes and remove them. So, it’s crucial to distribute your efforts. Focus on the first four and last two hours of the day to drive only meaningful engagement toward your product.
These two steps will help you engage with the community and get votes consistently:
- Split the day into several time windows to keep votes coming in steadily.
- Create an hour-by-hour tracker so that your team members know what tasks they need to work on and when to complete them.
After our launch, we divided the day into six 4-hour windows and created an hour-by-hour tracker for our team:
- Window 1: Email 50,000 subscribers + Make a social media announcement
- Window 2: Publish a post in community groups + Publish a post from our founder
- Window 3: Email another set of 50,000 subscribers + Publish a post from our sister company
- Window 4: DM our maker list + Publish an influencer post
- Windows 5 and 6: Engage with commenters + Make last-minute pushes
With this approach, we ensured a steady flow of votes throughout the day.
Use Social Media and Email Marketing
Your social media strategy should align with your voting windows and include an official announcement that kicks off on the launch date. This way, you can engage relevant communities well before the launch and build excitement and support.
Here’s a strategy to consider:
- Official Announcement: To create buzz, start the launch day with a big announcement on all your social media channels.
- Email Marketing: Send an official announcement email to your community members with details about the launch and how they can support you.
- Engaging Social Media Posts: Share engaging content with compelling visuals throughout the day to keep the excitement alive. Encourage your team and loyal customers to share these posts.
- Rapid Response: Respond quickly to comments and messages to boost engagement and build a stronger community.
We started our launch day with a big announcement on all our social channels, aligning with our voting windows.
- Email Outreach: We sent an email to our community of 300K+ developers subscribed to our weekly newsletter.
- Social Posts: Throughout the day, we kept the momentum going with engaging social media posts.
- Direct Messaging: We DM’d the makers we had contacted during the team challenge to gather support.
- Engagement: Quick responses to comments and messages boosted engagement and helped us build a strong community around our product.
Engage Influencers
Influencers can be crucial for reaching and building trust with the target demographic.
Here’s how you can make influencers part of your next Product Hunt launch:
- Identify high-engagement creators who can help promote your product.
- Vet potential influencers carefully to ensure that they have genuine engagement and a good track record.
- Collaborate with influencers to boost your visibility and engagement, especially during critical times, like the launch day.
During our launch, we received a flood of DMs from high-engagement creators offering LinkedIn promotions. At first, we were skeptical, so we carefully vetted 30 creators to make sure that they had genuine engagement and a solid track record.
Finally, we worked with four influencers. Despite costing $565, this strategy gave us a major advantage in the final hours of the launch day.
Results of Our Product Hunt Launch Strategy
Launch day can be intense, even on “lower-competition” days like Sundays. So, make sure that you:
- Are ready to face fierce competition.
- Keep a close eye on your ranking.
- Use tools like Product Wars and Hunted.Space to track your position in real time.
- Make a final push in the last few hours of the launch day by engaging with your community and rallying support.
Launch day was a whirlwind for us. Though Sundays are usually the easiest days to launch successfully, we faced some tough competition.
We monitored our ranking every minute using Product Wars — it was a thrilling experience! At times, the second-place product briefly overtook us. But the final two hours were crucial. Our team made a final push for further engagement with and support from our target audience.
By 11:59 pm, we had secured the #1 spot with:
- 821 upvotes
- 137 comments
- 2,496 page views
- 452 signups
After the Successful Launch
Securing the #1 spot on Product Hunt was a huge win for us, but we didn’t stop there. By using our Product Hunt win, we amplified our marketing efforts, strengthened our brand, and sustained momentum long after the initial launch.
Here’s how you can turn your Product Hunt victory into a powerful marketing tool:
- Add the #1 Product of the Day badge to your website. Display the badge on your homepage to boost credibility and show visitors your product is highly rated.
- Incorporate the badge elsewhere. Adding the Product Hunt badge to your social media profiles, email signatures, and sales pitches lets you spread the word and show off your social proof.
- Create a case study. Document your journey in a case study (like this one). Make sure to showcase the strategies that led to your victory and highlight your expertise.
- Share your strategy on social media. Engage your audience and position yourself as a thought leader by posting your launch day tactics and lessons learned on social media.
Make the Most of Your Product Hunt Launch
Attaining the #1 spot on Product Hunt was a big win for us at Arc.
It took a lot of planning and teamwork to make it happen. We started early, got advice from experts, created a great product page, and engaged with our community. We also used social media and influencers to keep the excitement going all day. This approach helped us 4x the performance of our Arc 3.0 launch, making it our best-ever one (after our 26 previous launches).
For a successful Product Hunt launch, plan ahead, get advice, involve your community, and spread the word via social media platforms and influencers. With an effective launch strategy and team effort, you can showcase your product’s capabilities, gain exposure, and reach the right early adopters and tech enthusiasts.
To find top marketers or designers who can help your product reach the #1 spot on Product Hunt, check out Arc today.
Looking for top talent fast? See how Arc can help you:
⚡️ Find developers, designers, marketers, and more
⚡️ Freelance or full-time remote + fully vetted
⚡️ Save up to 58% with global hires
