In this article, you won’t find Product Hunt launch tips, checklists, or links to communities to support your launch. Instead, I’d like to share our own experience and the insights we gained along the way.

On September 5th, we finally brought our brainchild, Exie, to life! But like any great story, this launch was not without its twists and turns.

For fellow entrepreneurs and innovators gearing up for their own big reveal, I’m here to share what we learned along the way and offer some actionable insights to help you turn your launch day into a success.

Preparations

We prepared for the launch for a long time, wanting to polish everything up so that our launch on ProductHunt would shine.

In fact, we should have launched earlier. The only thing that held us back was the integration with Google Sheets, which they had to verify and approve (and it took a lot), so we delayed the launch day a couple of times.

Next thing is video. We’ve worked hard on it to concisely and vividly tell our story.

Our goal was to clearly explain why our product is necessary, highlight the problem, and offer a solution. The result? 10 people watched our video.

What I learned:

👉 You don’t need to have everything at 100% to showcase your idea to the community. It’s ok when you want to do everything perfectly and include as many great features in the product as possible before you launch it. However, on platforms like Product Hunt, you can do this without having to wait for perfection.

The launch

On a launch day at 00:01 PST I was sitting in front of my laptop to make sure Exie is live on Product Hunt.

My previous launch in 2022 didn’t start well as there was a bug and the product launched earlier than we expected. So this time I decided to take full control of the launch.

For the first 4 hours I was able to see only our own rank and it was my key metric I was obsessed with.

I started to reach out to people who committed to support us to grow the number of upvotes and comments.

Exie is not featured

And then I get a message from our hunter. He tells me we were not featured by Product Hunt team and it means:

1. Exie doesn’t show up on a main page so we don’t get any organic traffic.
2. Our app can’t get any ranking, despite the number of upvotes.
3. Our app is listed in the bottom of the launch archive among apps with a couple of upvotes.

At this moment we realize that the only thing we can do now is to reach out to Product Hunt support and I need to do it asap.

I shoot a message to their mailbox along with sending another one in the chat on their website.

Hi Product Hunt team!

We just launched Exie and we believe it is outstanding product. We’d like to be listed in Featured section of the products launch list.

Can you please feature us there?

Much appreciated! ❤️

Andrey

At this time Exie gets #6 among other apps but I notice the rank is missing. All I have is hope, I continue reaching out to my contacts.

The only thing that helps me to keep it together is a reaction from people I get in touch with. Instant responses and support inspire me to go on.

In 2.5 hours I get a canned response from Product Hunt team:

Hey Andrey,

Every day, hundreds of new products are submitted to Product Hunt. Unfortunately, not everything can be featured on the homepage, which is the case with your post.

What a bummer…

Then I ask the last question to finally make sure that we’re out of it — “Does it mean we can’t take any rating like #6 or something because we are not featured?”.

And I instantly get the answer — “Yes only featured launches receive rankings”.

Same happened with another product. Guys were 2nd with an amazing app and huge support from the community. But since they were not featured as well, they didn’t get any rank.

Feel free to support their team 👉 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lala-2

It is what it is. Their platform, their rules.

Now the Product Hunt team decides who is worthy of receiving an award and who is not. Users only distribute the winners through upvotes.

I can only speculate about the reasons why we were left without a rating. I don’t know what factors the support team was referring to, as my questions went unanswered.

Here’s the take:

👉 If you’re planning to compete for Product of the Day and prepare a marketing campaign and engage your community, even with all that effort, it might not pay off simply because you were not included in the Featured listing. Unfortunately, you’ll find out about this on launch day, which can be quite disappointing.

Takeaways

Of course, we didn’t expect to acquire new customers from that launch. Our goal was to pitch our product to the Product Hunt community but since it wasn’t featured, we didn’t get organic traffic.

But we’ve got something different.

👉 As we prepared for our launch on Product Hunt, we conducted a thorough review of our product and rethought several aspects along the way.

👉 We created a lot of fantastic promotional materials that we are going to reuse in the future.

👉 We’ve got a huge support from our own community and friends which is much more valuable than any ranking.

👉 The same day we made a retro and tried to match our expectations with the results. I am once again convinced that I work in the greatest team.

👉 I’ve got lots of awesome connections with interesting people around the world.

Thanks everyone for your support! ❤️

About our app

Exie helps automate routine part of sales communications using just text information about the business and allows to convert Instagram prospects into customers https://exie.app/