Before we get into the details, if you don’t know how Product Hunt works, what “creator” or “hunter” means, or if you read some articles (which probably contain some mythological methods), I recommend you start with this one written by the Product Hunt team itself. Oh yeah, here’s a cool tool to track live upvote trends.
The preparations
Launching Product Hunt isn’t something you can be ready for in 2 or 3 days. We started our preparations over a month before launch day . The preparations focused on 3 main areas: development, creative, and marketing.
Development
This part probably took more than a month because there was a lot to do. We launched the Hebrew version at the end of February and needed to translate the entire interface, error messages, emails, etc. Translation was the easy part. There were a lot of development challenges to match the global standard and little oman phone number library things that weren’t always obvious to think about, like adding popular English fonts, adding more common third-party integrations, changing the display format of dates and times in the UI, and more.
To keep track of our development tasks we use Trello. We created a board called Release and there we put all the tasks that 'MUST BE DONE BEFORE RELEASE' and focused solely on them (and critical bugs, if any). Things like improving the editor, fixing small but annoying bugs, improving and bringing back the drag and drop interface and launching our clever autopilot trigger. Dani, our lead developer, managed to complete all of it on tim
We also upgrade our AWS servers (where the application is hosted) and Upress servers (where the main website is hosted) in advance, to be ready to handle high volumes of traffic.
Along the way we received some amazing scaling consulting from Adam Lev-Libfeld , and some experienced front-end developers took a look at our drag-and-drop interface and front-end website.
This part is very different for every startup, so I attached a to-do list for the following parts. We managed the following parts in a Google spreadsheet that all team members could access on Google Drive.
Study
I have to say that the creative part was the fun part. Avi, our creative manager, was in charge and did a great job with a little help from our remote artist for special occasions. What needed to be done was:
Creative Checklist:
Task It is extended
Facebook page and cover of our profiles.
Marketing
Gal and I were in charge of marketing. This kind of work never ends. It was a combination of bizdev, content, microcopy, support, advertising, and creative. Since we were waiting for this moment since the beginning of our adventure, we were highly motivated to do everything we could to make this launch the best we could. I want to share with you our to-do list:
Task It is extended
SEO for “poptin” – to be ranked on the top first page in Google
Make sure Facebook + Google remarketing pixels are placed
Setting up events in Google Analytics and connecting across domains
Please review the copy on the cover.
Write a blog post about how we differentiate ourselves from the competition.
Set up automated messages for Product Hunt users
on Intercom (with the discount)
Write 2-3 blog posts to share on launch day.
Join relevant Facebook groups and make a list of them
Join relevant Slack groups
Make connections with PH Makers
Create 'give feedback' and 'PH discount' bars in the Poptin app.
Install Smartlook (heatmaps and session recordings)
Open accounts on Brand24 and Menciona for social brand monitoring
Create a Google Adwords campaign around the Poptin brand
Please write the manufacturer's comment for PH in advance.
Send an email to our user base and mailing list about the upcoming release
Create some anticipation with heartwarming social media posts
(and tell everyone around you)
Make a list of more websites where you can share your startup besides PH
Hunt your hunter (Huh? Yes, you read that right. Make sure you get a hunter on your side at least 2 weeks before your big day.) By the way, you can hunt your own product and you'll probably be fine too.
Other things
Task It is extended
PREPARE YOUR FAMILY AND TELL THEM THAT YOU ARE GOING TO BE SUPER BUSY THIS MONTH
brand t-shirts
T-shirts
Create a fun and upbeat launch music playlist
Buy food, alcohol and lots of coffee and energy drinks.
IMG_20170717_15230633 (1)
Make a spreadsheet of all the things you need to do on launch day in chronological order.
Release day
The time difference between Israel and the East Coast is 10 hours. When it was midnight there, it was 10am here. So we planned to stay awake in the office from 10am until 10am the next day.
So what does launch day look like? The following schedule is written according to Israel time.
The day before: We shared the New Features blog post on social media, invited our friends to like the Poptin Facebook page, sent a blog post to Ánimo , and went to bed early.
