Learnings from launching Alldone.app on Product Hunt

A few days ago we launched Alldone.app on Product Hunt and I wanted to quickly write down and share a few (surprising) learnings i made along the way.

First — please check out and vote the listing on Product Hunt here https://www.producthunt.com/posts/alldone-app — and please support of course :)

Overall I am pretty happy with the launch and I would do it again. We got a few hundred signups because of the launch and it forced me to finally nail down the landing page and marketing material. Not sure if we are already at 100% but it is waaay better than before.

So what were my learnings?

• The preparation is more straightforward than I thought. If you look at all those “how to launch at Product Hunt” articles they make it look like a big deal but in the end you really only need a few things: 160 character tagline, description, first post, logo, video & screenshots. Also the guides on Product Hunt themselves are pretty good so really no need to research lots of additional articles.
• To get a good sense of the competition sort the recently launched products by newest here https://www.producthunt.com/newest — you will see that most products never make it past 1 or 2 votes. So you have a chance to do it better ;)
• You can already stand out if you convince 20–30 friends of yours to upvote when you launch. So write them personally on Whatsapp, linkedin, facebook, tik tok or whereever your friends are. Better to do it 1:1 then on group chats … so you don’t get igrnored.
• In my case i was lucky that after getting 30 votes or so Product Hunt decided to actually “freeze” the launch and rescheduled me for the next day where they then featured my. There was no communication whatsover with me so i guess this just happens or not.
• Find a good timing for the launch — you have 24 hours so use them and check out the time-zones in which Product Hunt lauches — i think they use San Francisco timezone.
• I was surprised to find out that the ranking of the day is actually not only driven by the number of upvotes. Alldone.app had like 100 more upvotes than some other apps before me. Not sure what happened there. Could be that the others had more engagement (e.g. comments) … or could be that “not all votes are the same” — meaning if high value hunters vote than this may count more? Not sure what happened. I would recommend to ask your friends to not only vote but also comment & discuss :)
• At the end of the day try to be in the Top 10 because then you will end up in the “daily newsletter” Product Hunt sends out. I don’t know how many subscribers they have but i guess it is significantly over 100k. So that would be nice marketing. Unfortunately Alldone.app only made it to #11 so I cannot tell you how many more sign ups this should bring.

So overall launching on Product Hunt is a good thing if you have the right expectations. It will give you some feedback and a few hundred customers. Nice :)

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