Your first Product Hunt launch? Learn from our experience!

On December 13 we launched Waverly on Product Hunt. It was our first launch here, and the four of us, makers, had only been on the platform for a few months. Below is what we did and what we learned... 🌱 What we did before the launch As new users, we got the feel for this community. We started looking at launches, participating in discussions, trying to understand what users here react to, what makes their heart beat. The more we did it, the more we realized it was a community of makers — like us — and the best way to connect was to candidly talk about challenges and ideas that relate to building real stuff to delight users. Another thing we did was to create a Coming Soon page as soon as possible. We iterated with a few captions until one seemed to catch people's attention more. Finally, we prepped our community via our mailing list and social networks, directing them to the Coming Soon page, telling them about the upcoming launch, and encouraging them to create accounts ahead of time. One of the best thing we did was to book an hour with Chris Messina. He helped us understand Product Hunt's evolving philosophy (eg. it's becoming less about hunters, more about makers) and he gave us a few useful pointer to rework our narrative and material — which led to the best outcome of this launch for us. (Teaser, teaser! 😉) 🚀 What we did on launch day On launch day we emailed our community and posted on our socials again. We then took shifts monitoring the launch page and engaging with users in there, especially those who were kind enough to write lengthy comments on why they loved the product or why they were hoping for something like Waverly in their life. We also reached out individually on LinkedIN with some of the makers we had interacted with on the site. What we didn't do was to buy votes. I had quite a few inbound emails telling me I could do so for a small fee and guaranteeing me that these would be untraceable by Product Hunt. Still, the priority for me was to respect the spirit of the community. I'm with Product Hunt for the long run, I believe in what's happening here, and I'm ready not to win product of the day if it means participating in this bigger mission. 🎯 The outcome for us The Product Hunt newsletter featured us as product of the day! This significantly increased our visibility in the US, which is great for us — being from Canada. Our initial goal was to get new users and to draw the attention of a few VCs. We succeeded at both, but slightly below our expectations. Also, a point of personal pride: longtime supporter of Waverly and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio decided to create an account on Product Hunt to support us! The biggest outcome, though, was the learning experience and the countless new connections to makers on the platform. I know these will grow stronger in time and that it will be the real value I'll gain from actively becoming a part of this community. 🍱 Biggest takeaway My biggest takeaway: launch on Product Hunt early, don't fret too much about the position your first launch will reach on the leaderboard. Then launch again. Become part of the community. Understand the spirit of the place and embrace it. Play by the rules, in the long run it always pay off.