How we got to the top products of the day without a hunter

Hi Product Hunt community! We launched our product Nitro this Monday and ended up with 335 upvotes and as #4 product of the day - which is awesome! We chose not to go for a hunter - instead, I hunted Nitro. I will publish a full-fledged article with launch tips soon, but for now - the key takeaways based on my experience. [Now we have 500+ upvotes - probably because we kept hustling even after the launch: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/nitro-2] TOP HUNTER VS. HUNTING YOUR OWN PRODUCT Yeah, we all know hunters' followers don't get emails about new products they hunted - only PH notifications which are so easy to miss. But I was concerned about getting to the main page. I've heard two versions about being hunted by a top hunter: 1) it means your product automatically gets placed to the main page; 2) top hunters have a "magic button" to place a product on the main page, but they can only use it once a day. Not sure which of the two is correct. By the way, one of "medium hunters" @alexanderisora made a great video about this topic: https://www.producthunt.com/discussions/i-made-a-youtube-video-about-how-to-find-a-hunter-for-your-ph-launch-any-feedback My decision was simple: I knew you had to book the time with a top hunter like 7-8 weeks before the launch. Well, 4 weeks prior to our launch I still hadn't received any replies from the top hunters. There was no time and no use panicking and trying to find a good hunter. Instead, I decided to use relationship building as my force. BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS: I believe posting in various support groups is generally less effective than reaching out to people you already know. A direct message is harder to ignore :) and if you've managed to create a meaningful connection, these people will be more interested in checking out your product. Building connections doesn't mean you tell others "hey, we're launching soon, we can support you and you support us, ok?" I'm sure many Product Hunters would simply ignore such messages. I am just a marketer, and I was reaching out to CEOs and top managers - I don't think they would be interested in messages like that. And, to be honest, I hate meaningless interactions, so I made my interactions meaningful :) How? I tried to find some common ground. Launching a product soon is a good place to start, so we talked and shared tips. Having a Ship page was an excellent topic for discussion. Participating in PH Discussions and responding to people's questions/requests for feedback worked too. I tried to share what I've learned with others, and I think it helped make our communication more "healthy", so to say. And on the launch day, it was so heart-warming to see comments coming from the people I know! It was like, "hey, I care about your launch and I know how you feel!" GETTING TO THE MAIN PAGE WITHOUT A TOP HUNTER Like I said, it was my big concern. On the launch day, not everything went as planned - for example, I didn't realize I couldn't post a product without adding my Maker's comment first. And it wasn't ready!!! I thought I'd post Nitro, have our CEO publish his maker's comment (as he is the key maker), then take my time and write my own comment. So I lost a few minutes here and there and posted our product 10 minutes after the day started at SF. We started out at #19 and were not visible on the main page. But when we started sending announcements about our launch - on our social media, to our Ship subscribers, to our clients, to people I'd connected with before - the upvotes started coming, and we jumped to #9! I felt relieved: we were visible on the main page. HIGH-QUALITY UPVOTES Have you seen products with lots of comments from users with the red ballon icon? That means they are new users who got a PH account less than a week ago. Votes from such new users have less weight. Moreover, if you get an upvote from such a user - and this user hasn't upvoted any products but yours - this upvote won't count. I've heard this from other makers, and I've seen this with Nitro: several upvotes got cut off. What I did to prevent this: I asked our team to create PH accounts 1 month in advance and to engage in some acitivities on PH (not many of my colleagues agreed actually, but I had about 15 people who created accounts and upvoted other products on PH). And when we announced our launch, I asked other colleagues NOT to create accounts now, cause it's too late and it won't count anyway. Also, comments are important, and we tried to have as much activity in the comments as we could. For example, when I posted about our launch on Reddit and Slack/FB groups, I mentioned our cool story in the video, Nitro's clean UI and some features - and asked for feedback about it. And of course we did our best to answer comments in real time. TIMING Picking the right day of the week was important. They say, "choose Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday if you want to get more eyeballs on your product, and weekend if you want less competition". Monday and Friday are kind of "in-between". I knew we probably wouldn't stand a chance on Tue/Wed/Thu, as our product is not as catchy as fun products and various no-code apps, graphic editors, etc. Weekend was not a good option either: I don't think many of my connections would be online on the weekend, so I wouldn't be able to count on their support. So I picked Monday - also hoping that we would get more votes during the week and maybe get to Products of the Week? We did get additional ~150 upvotes after the launch day, but I think one needs way more to become one of products of the week. On the busiest and most competitive days, top products get up to 1200-1500 upvotes. I suppose these are the products that end up becoming products of the week. POST-LAUNCH ACTIVITIES This may be more useful for the top products with 1000+ upvotes, but I believe everyone should try it to get more exposure for your product :) I changed the tagline in my profile so that people could see I've recently launched a product, and kept commenting on new products and discussions. Also, it's a good idea to post on Reddit and IndieHackers about your insights from the launch. All this leads to more people checking out your product - and, hopefully, signing up or at least leaving some feedback. Thanks for reading! That's it for today, but I'll be back soon with a more detailed article about launch preparations! :)