My tips to rank 1st on Product Hunt as a solopreneur

[cassandra77]

After feeling most launch platforms were missing something, I started my own with a simple difference: help product makers get feedback over a month, and not just fight for upvotes during a launch day.

I shipped the platform and submitted it to Product Hunt.

The results were

• 5k+ visits on launch day, 10k in total.
• featured 2 times in the Product Hunt newsletter.
• product of the day in front of Claude3 (Anthropic).
• product of the week for Devools, and 2nd product of the week for marketing tools.
• 10k unique users after a month

I invested $0 in the launch, so pretty happy with the results so far

If you're preparing a launch too, here are some tips

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 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. A few days before the launch, tease again. So people know it matters to you.
5. 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
6. Post every 2-3 hours: mostly about your progress, about your competitors as well - it was a good way to put the spotlight on your product's value (not just on the launch).

And here's my launch platform for those interested: Microlaunch

Hope it helps.

 

[newbie2016]

@cassandra77 you glossed over arguably the most important part.

The power of a community beats VC money and bots.

the hardest part is building a community from 0.

 

[cassandra77]

@newbie2016 Totally, building a community is the hardest part. Not an audience (unidirectional), but rather a community where your daily engage with people you like. It also involves daily community interactions. I started nurturing mine probably 1 year ago, and it's still a work in progress

 

[tmtj]

@cassandra77 hey could you please expand more on that? How to build a community exactly?

 

[cassandra77]

@tmtj There's no magic bullet I guess, but in my case, I mostly focused on daily interacting with other product builders. I did it over 2023-2024. Also gave lot of help, feedback and got involved in various projects. These people were the core adopters of my platform. When you start a community, you have to nurture it daily: on social media, but also in-app. How? By providing new content, events, games and by entertaining/educating your community members. It takes a lot of energy, but it's definitely worth it.

 

[tmtj]

@cassandra77 Thank you for sharing with us.

Quick follow up question: what approach do you use initially? are you like gather people and make a discord server, or you interact to an existing community and build your raport/reputation there?

 

[rethink88]

@cassandra77 Well done. You are beating product hunt at their own game.

 

[cassandra77]

@rethink88 Haha, thank you. I'm not really trying to compete with PH, but instead to fill a gap they aren't addressing

 

[rethink88]

@cassandra77 They have many gaps. I filled in the form on your site and didn’t hear back. Is it a manual review process?

 

[cassandra77]

@rethink88 Absolutely, I review every submission manually for now. I'm also working on improving the onboarding so you receive an automatic email. Products are onboarded on the 1st of each month, with some mid-month batches too. Making sure you'll be in the next one in April, except if you prefer May

 

[rethink88]

@cassandra77 Great! Also want to note that PH never responded to any of my attempts to reach them via their site support chat or even personal emails to their support managers. They don’t care about small accounts and have many bugs/glitches on their site and my attempted launch there was a disaster.

 

[cassandra77]

@rethink88 I think they mostly focus on VC backed companies. That's a shame cause many smaller creators (me included) create worthy products, but that's another debate probably. You can always reach me here on Reddit in the dms (or on Twitter). Simpler to keep it simple & manual for now

 

[lisab123]

@cassandra77 Great advice, thanks.

Apart from that. Building in public makes sense to me as a solopreneur. But does that mean to go all in? In my case, I’d be shy to show myself because I got a well paid job already you know. How do people do it?

 

[cassandra77]

@lisab123 That's a good question. In my case, I'm all-in, but I have many friends who also have a 9-5 job alongside their indie hacking journey. Using your personal brand for your 9-5 could also work, depending on how your boss feels about social media.

 

[lisab123]

@cassandra77 Ah and if you don’t mind, please share the amount of traffic your post brings. I‘m really curious about that. I think Reddit - especially when doing it right as you did - can get you some serious traffic for free. No pressure tho

 

[cassandra77]

@lisab123 Absolutely, I already share all the stats & analytics, that's part of how I feel about building in public. Posted yesterday, and after 10h, this post has 15k views and 80 total shares.

 

[mayuyou]

@cassandra77 Really good tips. You say that you scheduled 1 month before launch? Why so much time?

 

[cassandra77]

@mayuyou Thank you. The MVP took me about a month, then I started by inviting product makers to try it for ~10 days, before deciding to launch it on PH. I'd say 2-3 weeks was the right amount of time to know which features to focus on for the PH launch

 

[lin1966]

@cassandra77 How did you invite them? Did you just text them over PH?

 

[mabris]

@cassandra77 Great platform shipping features all day long, I love everything about it, founder is very responsive on twitter too