Ranking 1st on Product Hunt as a solopreneur - 15 key lessons

Launch Day

I did post on Indie Hackers a month ago to share the idea-to-MVP journey that took me exactly 1 month and was starting to get decent traction on social media.

The platform I'm shipping is called Microlaunch: you launch products, get feedback, traction and ideally first customers over a month. It's used complementarily to Product Hunt, either before or after it.

My Product launch for Microlaunch was scheduled for a Tuesday and it was frankly a super competitive day: one of my competitors was Claude 3 by Anthropic😅

We managed to win the competition, thanks to the amazing indie makers' community💪 ... now is the time to share my learnings.

My 15 Lessons for a successful Product Hunt launch

1. Your product's value should be simple, almost naked. Your pitch direct: "Do X, get Y". The value should be minimal and visual. I launched without a landing page, so I advise you to focus on the MVP.

2. Start with a Beta, 1-month max: use it as a teaser. Be visual about it. Show graphs and screenshots. Build in public.

3. Have a clear goal in mind: in my case, it was to "maximize the 24-hour traffic", but it can be "rank in top-3". Choose a metric to monitor.🎯

4. Then tease on PH too 2 weeks before. Aim for ~20-30 followers on PH.🔥

5. A few days before the launch, tease again. So people know it matters to you.

6. Sleep well, wake up early. The first 2 hours are crucial. Try to secure top-5 so the PH team automatically features you. Sent them a message on their Intercom after 3 hours, looks like I was already featured.

7. Think cross-channel: I mostly relied on X but also posted on Reddit, IH, Hacker News, and more. Also posted on the PH community to tease on launch day. Post early in the day as people won't directly see the posts🔀

8. The power of a community beats VC money and bots. Please never buy fake data - it'll harm your reputation, and people will see corrective drops in your upvotes🤗

9. Comments matter a lot, be reactive, and answer all of them. Monitor your progress.

10. Post every 2 hours: mostly about your progress, about your competitors as well🤼 - I kept posting about Microlaunch and it was also a good way to put the spotlight on your product (not just on the launch).

11. Go to sleep? Yes! But wake up early to continue the challenge😴

12. Be relevant, help others during launch day, if they ask let them know you're launching: let them the opportunity to support if they want to.

13. Be genuine: if you're an emotional person, write down your emotions and share.❤️

14. Be funny and visual: use smileys, show data, people like graphs. I used a lot of them.

15. Be tactical: don't use all your bullets right away, 24 hours is a long time. You might want to increase the gap or temporize.

Results

Simply way beyond my initial expectations:

• 5k+ visits on launch day.
• Around 10k in total visitors.
• Got featured 2 times in the Product Hunt newsletter.
• Got product of the day.
• Got product of the week for Devools, and 2nd product of the week for marketing tools.
• Crossed 10k unique users in 2 months.
• Crossed 30k visits since the first deployment 2 months ago.

This is exciting, and I'm committed to making Microlaunch the best place around for product makers and people struggling with marketing & distribution.

I would love to read your comments guys, let me know how I can help 🙏