How I get customers for $0 with Product Hunt

0:00by the end of this video you would have built a billion doll software and get acquired by Google so you can spend the rest of your life testing out every new trendy Tex tax all right I'm not so sure about all that but my promise is this at the end of this video you'll know exactly how to use the platform product tant in order to drive traffic to your website and grow your startups and you'll see that it doesn't require any prior experience or doesn't cost any money but why should you trust me well I got the maker of the Year award in 2023 I launched 21 products on product hunt

0:27in the last two to three years and I got 13 Awards and you will see that at the beginning I didn't get anything and then it got easier and easier so there are some knowledge that you can reuse to replicate the same let's go all right first product tun 101 and is it worth launching your startup there there's about 4 million visitors on the site every month and it's high quality traffic there are a bunch of designers programmers agency solopreneurs so uh the eyeballs you're getting there are very good if you end up in the top product of the day you can expect 2 to 3,000 visitors just from the platform

0:57but it's not it they also have one of the biggest Tech news Lor out there so if you end up in the top 5 to 10 product of the day you will also get shared somewhere there and you will add another extra thousands or 2,000 visitors to your site and finally there are a bunch of media that feed off product hunt because this is where the new trendy Tech happens so after the launch when the traffic goes down you'll see some spikes coming from other platforms and product tant is very famous so overall it's a very good investment for your startup all right if you haven't

1:25launched on product hun here is roughly how it works every 24 hours there is a new bunch of product that are displayed on the homepage of the platform and they're competing to get the most of votes the timer resits at midnight PST and for the first 4 hours there is no ranking based on ofos it's just purely random to avoid the winner takes all after the fifth hour the products start to rank based on their number of up votes and so it's a winner takes all game and if you're at the top you're almost guaranteed to stay around the top and if you're at the bottom it's very

1:52hard to claim up that's why the first four hours are the most important and in this video we're going to cover how to get the most up votes during this time there are two ways to get up votes on product tant and first is called the inbound upvotes the up votes that are coming from users who are actually browsing the platform and they find your listing and they decide to up vote it on the product hunt home feed there are tons of other products competing against yours for attention and the way you win is by nailing three things your name your tagline and your logo the name of

2:21your startup should be short simple and very easy to read and you would rather ditch uh like VC style names like stripe or Tesla and go for something very logic IAL like ship fast a tool to ship fast if you want a tutorial to make names for products I wrote a short article about finding good names for startups as a solopreneur in the blog in the description below next is your tagline and it's the most important part of your listing it should be very short like 60 to 70 characters maximum it should be one sentence and it should tell exactly why would a random stranger on the

2:53internet invest its precious time for your product it shouldn't be about your product but it should be about what it's doing for your customers uh what pain is it relieving how their life would be after they try your product why is it worth their time and finally your logo this is more the creative part that is up to you but if you see that there are many logos that are blue colors maybe go for a green that contrast well you want to stand out and be remarkable now if users decided to click on your listing there's two more important parts the first one is your Carousel of photos you

3:20can put I think up to seven eight maybe even 10 the first three matters and what matters too is that you keep those images super simple one image should be about one feature and if you want to add a screenshot of your product this is a very good thing but do not add the entire dashboard of your users for instance make sure that you zoom on those photos and you show only a very tiny part of your software as if the user was actually looking at uh your software very very close cuz nobody would read the text that's inside unless it's a big headline and the last

3:50important part of this puzzle is the first comments you the funer are going to write your little story how you ended up with this product ID as the first com on your listing this is very important because people relate with people and stories you are not a VC back company with millions of dollars for marketing who just want to make even more money you are a nice person who just want to quit their 9 to5 and you have a story to tell so explain why you came up with this product ID explain what it engag for you how much time you invested in it and the comment section supports

4:21markdown so you can add links for instance to your products so if people are browsing the comments you can directly link them to your product as well as link your social media if if you have a YouTube channel or if you're writing your journey on Twitter make sure you add a link to that part so they can start growing a little following that's going to be very helpful for the next part all right now the second way to get up votes is through outbound up votes it's basically anyone who is not currently on the product on platform but decides to come and help you for instance when I got started I would send

4:49my product link to all my family and friends and ask them for up votes but there are many other more reliable way the first one is Twitter Twitter and product hunt have a good audience overlap there are tons of solopreneurs on Twitter who have a producton account and they will be happy to help you and then it boils down to making good tweets so learn the basic of writing how to make a tweet that's easy to read learn how to make a good headline that catch people attention learn how to tell your story in a nice way that people can relate learn how to make good creative

5:16that will gets people attention for me it all started with fun launch videos back then I had a few hundred followers on Twitter and I would make those videos where I would go on a fake podcast with jogan or I would go in a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and this felt like me it was fun to make and some people on Twitter enjoyed it so they started to watch the video up both my product on listing and also reshare the link that really helped me boost the product on launch and that's also how I grew an audience I actually made a little course about how I make those videos if you

5:44want to check it it's in the description it might sound a little bit discouraging if you're getting started and you don't have an audience yet but remember an audience is not created out of thin air people follow you for a reason and that reason is because you might be the guy who launched a bunch of products on product hunt so you got to start somewhere build the audience or build the products start with the products launch things on product T and this is how you're going to get people follow you on Twitter that later will help you achieve more momentum for every new product hunt launches and of course if

6:13you're active on any other social media Facebook Instagram Tik Tok wherever this is you are make sure to share the links to your producton listing there to get some votes another way to drive out bone up votes is through your actual users let's say you have launched a product already and you have 100 active daily users or something like that you can tell them through mailing list or anything that you can reach out to them to help you support the product on launch if they're your users they probably already love you and it's going to drive some more upvotes to your producton listing and finally you want

6:41to add a badge to your website a little Banner top left bottom right wherever this is you think fits well that says oh we are live on product hunt for the next 24 hours we would love your support that is very helpful for two reasons first the product hunt users who clicked your websites and are now visiting your leting page it's a good way to bring them back to the platform to give you an extra up and second you can launch your startups on many other platforms at the same time you can launch on Hacker News Reddit Twitter at the same time and you can get extra traffic from those

7:08platforms when they see the badge on producton some of them will come and give you a little hands and up vote your producton listing this is what I do all the time I scheduled the product hunt launch and I would launch on every other platform so it brings an extra juice to product hunt and if you want to know how to launch on those other platforms I wrote a little something on my blog in the description okay now you might be convinced it's a good time for you to launch your startups but which day should you actually launch it depends on what you want if you want social proof

7:33or traffic if you want traffic Mondays to Fridays are usually the busiest busiest in terms of traffic people actually browsing the site but also busier in terms of competition so it's harder to get an award but it's easier to get traffic and since VC startups don't work on Monday at midnight I recommend you to start launching on Monday instead if you're looking for social proof and you want to get that product tant badge to embade on your site I recommend you to launch on weekends and especially Sundays are usually the calest days so you have let's competition and more chance to get the badge is your product ready to be

8:02launched on product well based on the T-shirt I'm pretty sure that you can guess I'll tell you it's time to launch it but I would argue that you should wait until you have at least some testimonials on your site before launching the reason is simple there will be tons of new people discovering your products so you want to make sure you have some kind of social proof because it's much easier to sell a product if people are already validating it and keep in mind that you can still relaunch your product a few month later and you can also launch some free tools to promote your main products so don't

8:29hesitate to launch as soon as you have social proof the first product on launch is hard and might not go as you expected but it's a necessary step if you're serious about becoming a solopreneur quitting your 9 to5 and become financially independent it's a tiny step that's going to help you in the future you're going to start growing a little audience on Twitter because people will admire you for launching your product so the next time you launch a product you can ask your audience to help you out which is going to grow a bigger audience and it's going to be like a little Loop that's going to keep going up and up and

8:56up and you'll see that after a couple of launches you're almost guaranted gued to have one of the product tant badge and you will as well get a couple hundred if not thousand visitors on your side and grown a little audience so my advice is to not overthink it just launch it and keep repeating the same recipe over and over until luck finds you all right that's it for this video if you liked it you can like the video and if you're looking for other ways to Market your startup I drop a link to my blog below where there are many other uh free ways to Market uh your startup and G

9:23customers and until the next video I hope you just launch it