The result? A perfect 26-26-26 combo that I couldn’t have planned if I tried 😅
Some context: I spent good time in building Clipo AI , a platform that turns one video into 20 pieces of social-ready content (clips, carousels, thumbnails, personalized posts, AI images). 12 products in one workflow. I was so deep in product building that I only started launch prep about a week before going live.
What went wrong:
• Started with only 9 followers on the PH page at launch. Most top launches have 500+. After launch I have around 50 now. Distribution was my biggest failure.
• Had about 18 confirmed supporters. Only 12 showed up in first few hours. Needed 50-100 for a strong first hour.
• Many upvotes from genuine new PH accounts of my friends (real name, real profile) got filtered by the anti-fraud system
What went right in 1 week I tried:
• I started posting regularly on Twitter in Build in public communities and got few people to support me (They wanted my support in their product as well 😅)
• Started posting in product hunt forums and got few supporters from there, fellow makers who were planning to launch soon.
• The biggest number of supporters I got through was from searching the product hunt launch archives with similar and same domain product launches and people showing interest in them. I directly reached out to them and around 20% of them agreed to support my launch.
• And lastly posting on Reddit and finding fellow makers who were launching the product on same day. The community is helpful. They will upvote.
The honest truth: Product Hunt rewards distribution as much as product quality. You can have the best product on the page and still rank low if nobody knows you’re launching. The ranking doesn’t reflect the product, it reflects the pre-launch community work.
Also most people will only know that you have launched your product only if it gets in featured list of the day which was around 22 products out of perhaps 420 launches on 6th May. Nobody generally clicks on all launches and goes through hundreds of launches, they just see featured product which my product missed by a bit. And to get in this list you need to have strong first hours after the launch because as soon as list is live the featured products will automatically get more views and more likes thereby widening the gap even more.