There are many great guides to launching on Product Hunt just google “how to launch on product hunt” and read the the top 3-5 posts.

This post will be me sharing my experience from 3 different types of Product Hunt launches.

The first launch was https://saaspages.xyz/ it is a free tool that helps designers and marketers view best practices of SaaS landing pages. It did very well, and currently has 1885 upvotes and is increasing everyday.

That puts it in the top 400 products of all time beating companies who have raised 10m+ from huge VCs.

On launch week we got 10,000 visitors to the site and another 9000 the weeks after from blogs and newsletters.

SaaS pages definitely helped us with the traffic in the beginning since its intention is to be a pure value add side project and it could also be used as a nice funnel to our main project. Additionally, we've been contacted by some people who gave us more advice on growth.

The best part of it is that it took us only 1-2 weeks of work & even months after the launch the site has organic traffic and still acts as a funnel to Versoly.

SaaS Pages traffic after launch: 

How SaaS Pages affected Versoly traffic:

The second launch was for https://versoly.com/ , we did the same launch style as SaaS Pages however upvotes and visitors were much lower. It is currently at 438 upvotes and we got around 3000 visitors on launch.

First Versoly launch:

We had 600 demos and 60 demos sign up with their email. However we got 0 paying customers from the launch.

One thing I rarely see brought up is the lack of paying customers that Product Hunt brings.

It was still worth it for us from an SEO point as we saw certain keywords rank higher and customers started saying they found us on Google.

Paid products don’t do as well as free products on Product Hunt.

Our recent feature launch on Product Hunt had very similar results to the Versoly launch. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blog-by-versoly/ , currently at 460 upvotes and 3000 visitors.

We got 400 demos, 70 sign ups and a few paying customers. The comments were very insightful as well.

Second Versoly launch:

Product Hunt drives a lot of free traffic with little work if done efficiently.

I think the most important parts of a launch are:

• Images with added text
• A video 
• One liner, description and the first comment
• Having an audience to get the first 20 upvotes
• Launching at 00:01 San Francisco time

If you do all of them well, then you have done the best you can and then it is up to luck. By following the list above we have been able to get 1st, 3rd and 3rd on 3 launches.

What we learned:

We found that providing value with free tool works very well, visitors shared it with their colleagues and friends. It also doesn't have to be a large and/or technical product.

The most difficult part of doing well on Product Hunt is ranking well at the start. Other projects on Product Hunt with less upvotes would usually beat us in the beginning due to their algorithm, and we were worried that we would not be featured on the "popular" list during peak hours where traffic is the highest. The first and second time we had to speak with support. The third time the algorithm fixed itself after 2 hours.

The best way to tackle that problem is to have around 20 supporters leave feedback on your project as fast as possible. That will give you a great head start and give you the best opportunity to rank well.

If you have any feedback or questions email me at volkan@versoly.com or dm on https://twitter.com/volkandkaya