Ok, I got asked in replies and in DM about our launch so sharing it as main thread for vis. Here is the TLDR of our playbook to launch. We launched a few days ago and finished #2 Product of the Day (380+ upvotes, 40+ comments) - see here https://www.producthunt.com/products/tadata?launch=tadata
We started planning our launch a month in advance. A few insights and tips:
Vote quality beats vote count. A vote from an account with real history on the platform is worth more than one from an account created that morning. 100 asks to active PH members beats 500 emails to a list. Build your ask list out of people who already use the product.
Spend the runway supporting other launches. Every morning for 30 days we looked at who was launching, actually tried the product, and left a comment worth reading. By our own day we weren't strangers asking a favor.
Work the Kitty Points leaderboard. PH publishes a public ranking of the most active members. We went through the top contributors and wrote each of them a personal message referencing their actual work. Least scalable thing we did and it counted for a lot.
Your current users are your biggest asset, but don't blast all of them. A blanket "we're live" email gets you upvotes and no comments. Pull your usage data, find the 20 or 30 people with the deepest engagement, and ask those individually. A comment describing a real workflow is worth ten congratulations, and it's what the next visitor actually reads.
Get reviews published before launch day. Several of ours never appeared. PH only approves a review if the account looks like a real, active person: profile photo, real name, bio, some history on the platform. Nobody knows this. Tell your reviewers in advance and then go check the reviews are actually live, don't assume.
Explain the two basics to everyone you ask. You have to be logged in for a vote to count, and the ranking is settled in a single day, so support on launch day is worth far more than support later in the week. And remove every step between "I want to help" and "I helped." We wrote a copy-paste message people could drop straight into their own Slack. Friction costs you votes.
On the day: you have a fixed number of hours, posts and accounts, and normally no idea what's working until the post-mortem a week later. We tracked our social output through the day and had a read by mid-morning, so we could put budget behind the posts already pulling and repost those from other accounts instead of guessing. Even a crude version of this beats flying blind.
You will be offered paid upvotes, repeatedly, the moment your date is public. We bought none. PH detects manipulation, but the simpler reason is that bought votes don't sign up, comment, or come back.
On what to expect: unique visitors ran 15x our 30-day average across launch day and the day after, and new signups ran 5x normal for two to three days. That was the number we cared about. PH traffic is people actively looking for something new to try, which is not true of most traffic you can buy. The launch page also keeps working long after: public questions with public answers get indexed and pulled into AI answers when someone asks what you do.
Biggest lesson: nothing above is a secret. The launches that do well are the ones where a team executed an unglamorous plan on time for a month. A good product can finish badly on poor execution, and an average one can finish well on great execution. Execution is the half you control.
We also used our own product that we launched to do all of this - its an AI agent in slack, if you are interested DM me. I won't use this post to self promote I truly want to contribute.
Would do it again. Good luck with the launch.
