Visitors of Product Hunt put a lot of trust in ranked websites.
Being ranked at the top will bring you a lot of leads and visitors. And good ones.
In fact, ProductHunt takes around $4000 per day to promote you as a paid company.
Last year Linvo took 1st of the day, and it was pretty easy.
I will let you know what steps you should take.
Let talk about the step you need to prepare before you launch
You need to choose a date to release your product.
"The best days" Like Monday and Tuesday are the hardest ones. Why? Because you are also competing with big companies such as Stripe. If they decide to release the same date as you. That would make it almost impossible to win.
We released Linvo on Christmas the competition was so low, We Didn't need a lot of upvotes to win.
We won by the way.
Open product hunt and browse into the highest-ranking companies of the current day. Check if they have a Hunter.
Those hunters have tons of followers.
Make a list of all the Hunters you can find.
When they hunt a product, this product automatically gets a lot of upvotes.
Then try to approach those hunters via Linkedin and emails.
Some of them charge money, Some don't.
You can have multiple hunters
Try to approach Facebook groups of SaaS founders and offer the admin to do a giveaway in exchange for upvotes.
That can be something specific for your product like
- 3-month subscription.
- A lifetime deal.
Or something like $20 coupon for Amazon.
The bigger the offer it's more likely to get an upvote.
So why founders and not just a group with many people?
Not every upvote is good, and if you go to your profile, you can see you have "points". When you just register to product hunt, you have 0 points.
People who upvote you with 0 points do more harm than good. That's why founders' groups are the best. They are already registered to product hunt and have points.
Create a big list of valid influencers that can post your product on their feed. Those influencers are most likely to take money. You can approach them on Linkedin or via Email. You can also automate this progress using Linvo.
Automate your Linkedin and send messages like "We are releasing our product on product hunt on this date, would you be able to share my post and help me",
If you can offer something that's great.
Again, Use Linvo, how many times do I need to say to use Linvo?
The best one is, of course, your newsletter, but if you have just started your company, you might not have a lot there.
Post it on your Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter.
Your friends are most likely to help.
Nobody said you have to put your product logo on Product Hunt, you can put whatever you want.
You can also put an attractive animation or a "notification" circle to make people come to your product and read about it.
That can be a bummer but the voting starting at 7:00 am UTC time, so wake up early and post it, the cycle is 24 hours.
If not you might not get featured, and will not be in the homepage competition.
In those groups, you can post your product and get votes from people with points.
You can also send messages to the people in the group and ask them for upvotes. They would happily give you because they will ask you also in the future.
Make sure you join those groups before you launch your product.