How we got our Dev Tool ‘Product of the Day’ in Product Hunt (And Survived)

This article was co-written by Gabriel Manor and Daniel Bass

We just launched on Product Hunt two days ago and got ranked No. 1 Product of the Day (Aiming for Product of the Week - fingers crossed). Following the launch, we decided to share our thoughts and experiences in this blog to help other developer tool companies. So, without further ado, here’s how we got ‘Product of the Day’ and survived -

What is Product Hunt, and why does it matter?

In case you are not familiar, Product Hunt is a curation platform for new products. It allows you to post about what you're building, get some eyes on it, and gain some important resources for every new product out there - reviews, opinions, and, most importantly, potential users.

There are several major players who started off in ProductHunt, including Zapier, Slack, and Notion - to name a few. Getting "Discovered" on Product Hunt can often serve as a really great push to get people to know your product.

The thing is, Product Hunt is quite generic and is usually used to promote classic B2C products, which often deters developer tool teams to try and promote their own products there, seeing the platform as unfitting for their target audience.

That being said, after some research into other developer tools that had successful launches, we decided to try and get in on the action.

Basically, here’s how it works:

A ‘Hunter’ suggests your product to be showcased on Product Hunt. In most cases, this is done by someone who is very active on the platform and has a good following. You can also put in some extra effort and do it yourself.
Once your product is live, people can comment, review, and upvote. The ratings are not shown for the first four hours of the day to keep things fair, and the goal is to reach the highest amount of upvotes in the first 24 hours.
Got 1st place? You get awarded “Product of the Day” - a title that grants you a feature in Product Hunt’s newsletter, some social media attention, and usually lots of traffic (Which hopefully translates into actual customers).

Who are we?

Before we dive into our experience, a few words about us - Permit.io is a cloud service that simplifies creating and managing application-level permissions through a user-friendly low-code UI interface. We support all permission models (RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC) and seamlessly integrate with your application using our SDK, providing real-time insights into your permissions. Permit.io has been around for a couple of years now, but after finally releasing our support in all three permission models we felt it was a good time to make an official announcement and put ourselves out there - hence this launch.

What did we achieve?

Let’s talk about how we did (before we dive into how we did it) -

Product Hunt “Product of the Day” for 13/09/2023.
A feature in the Product Hunt newsletter.
Our launch video got 100K+ views on YouTube and got Tweeted by Product Hunt (500K + followers).

We achieved X4 times more votes than previous launches by competitors.

How did this affect us?

1.3K hits on a dedicated Product Hunt landing page on our website within 24 hours.
A spike of 500% in signups for our platform (Double to similar marketing activities/feature launches).

A graph showing new signups to the Permit.io platform, with the launch day spike.

Seven new potential customer meetings within 24 hours of the launch (Compared to one on average in similar marketing activities).

The conclusion - The launch was effective in supplying us with quality “Leads”.

Product Hunt for Developer Tools

Managing a Product Hunt launch for a developer tool is tricky business. Considering we are a PLG-focused company, we don’t really do the classic sales pitches and commercials. Our goal is to have developers believe our tool is useful after they have tried it, and not because someone convinced them it is (Which, knowing developers, is close to impossible).

The classic tricks, tips, and growth hacks usually suggested for B2C products don’t reallywork when you are marketing to a developer audience - just try posting anything that smells even remotely promotional on r/programming, or running massive ad campaigns like there’s a single developer out there not using an ad blocker.

Considering these factors, here’s what we decided to do -

Our Product Hunt launch to-do list:

The Launch Video:

Authorization, like various other concepts in the development space, has two main issues when it comes to marketing:

It gets REALLY complicated REALLY quickly and is very difficult to explain in simple terms.
It can be very hard to pour fun, excitement, and intrigue into a concept developers find dreadfully annoying and tedious to begin with (which is kind of the reason we exist).

For those two reasons, we had two main goals our video had to achieve:

It needed to explain what we do in the simplest way possible (a good measurement is asking someone with zero development background to watch it and ask “What does this company do” - if they give even a vaguely accurate answer, you’re on the right track).
It needed to be fun. No developer likes watching ads, even if it's for an amazing product they desperately need. If you want to grab anyone's attention - make sure you are creating something that’s genuinely designated for them to enjoy, and not just sell your thing.

To create our video, we wrote a simple script and employed the narration and editing skills of our very own talented developer advocate Filip Grebowski.

Social media, and community outreach (Message and visuals)

We prepared some social media content to announce on launch day, leveraging every channel we have a significant following in to try and grab people’s attention.

A company Q&A cheat sheet

This one is pretty self-explanatory - as votes and comments start pouring in, there tend to be a lot of comments and questions about your product. We created a sort of guide to assist our team in replying to as many comments and questions as possible. No question should remain unanswered.

A dedicated landing page

We created a designated landing page for the launch, to which a user clicking the link from Product Hunt will be redirected. This page was more designated to drive conversion rather than getting us more upvotes. This page must answer three key questions:

What is the issue we are here to solve (Again, explained in the simplest way possible).
How we solve it.
Why you should solve it by using our product.

A specialized launch day kit

To make it easier for our community members, users, influencers, friends, or anyone else who wants to help spread the word, we created a launch day kit consisting of graphics, our video, explainer materials, Tweet/LinkedIn post ideas, basically anything they can use to get the word out.

Website banners

To encourage existing website visitors and users of our app to upvote us, we added a simple banner at the top, asking users to support the upcoming launch.

An engaging blog to generate more traffic

More on this in the “Growth Hacking” section.

How much did we spend?

As most of the work was done by our in-house marketing team, the total sum invested in the launch amounted to 800 USD. This sum was invested in three activities:

A Twitter Space with an influencer from the developer space which we know has an audience interested in dev tool-related content and news.
A campaign on Instagram for the launch video. This one is only really relevant if your company (Or, in our case, the developer advocate working in the company) has an actual Instagram presence, followers, engagement, and a regular content cadence.
A YouTube campaign for the launch video. Even though, as we said, most developers tend to employ various tools to avoid seeing these types of ads, we decided to invest a minor sum into it just as a ‘hail mary’.

Our growth hacking tips:

From our measurement of the launch aftermath, here are some ‘growth hacking’ tips we can recommend -

Reach out to your community

If you are not a brand-new product, and you at least have some users who use and enjoy your product, don’t be afraid to reach out to them and ask for their support. This can of course be done with a simple cold email (Which doesn’t tend to do well), but if you have a channel through which you can contact users who are more active - make sure to do that.

In our Slack community, many members who we reached out to and asked to support us during the launch did so gladly, sharing it on their social media and within their own communities.

Reaching out to people in adjacent communities who are open to collaborating can also be a great way to broaden your reach (i.e. if your tool is built on top of an open-source component, and you have a good standing with the maintainers of that project).

Cooperate with influencers

Find as many influencers related to your space, and try to build a relationship of cooperation with them. This can be generally useful when you announce new features and want to make a splash. It’s also important to note that not all of these relationships have to be business-focused. If developers genuinely like your product and find it useful, they would often love to share it with other people in their field.

A blog covering “10 Exceptional Developer Tools Launched in 2023”

As part of our content strategy for the launch, we decided to showcase other tools that the developers in our company use. This type of content is a win for you as well as the other tools you mention, and it's a great way to give each other a boost. Articles on these topics tend to do very well on both social media and news outlets. This served as a great incentive for other dev tool companies to help us out during the launch.

Organize a company-wide launch meeting

The first two hours of your launch are golden. For a successful launch, you need to get to the first place on Product Hunt before the initial voting results are published (Four hours into the day). If you manage to get to the top within that time frame - it’s going to be very hard to knock you down from the first place. It’s no surprise people tend to upvote the project in the first place (Especially those coming to the Product Hunt website organically), so once the initial results get published it can already be too late to make a significant jump up.

Having everyone in the office reaching out to friends, colleagues, and communities they are a part of at once served as a crucial game-changer which allowed us to gain over 300 upvotes within the first two hours of the launch.

Adapting to time zones

It’s important to realize there could be major voting spikes depending on your time zone. A Product Hunt day starts at 00:30 AM PST. We managed our launch in GMT+3, meaning our initial post was at 08:30 AM. In the US East Coast, however, it was 01:30 AM. That meant we had to prepare a second wave of content for around 15:30 (08:30 EDT) when people in the US wake up and go online. Preparing for this in advance helped us leverage the full potential of our community reach-out effectively.

A low-budget ad campaign for our video on YouTube and Instagram

The YouTube and Instagram campaigns we ran did surprisingly well, giving us a nice boost in upvotes and traffic. This can be attributed to the launch video that generated lots of positive attention, as well as our Developer advocate’s significant Instagram presence.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Before the launch, we considered a few different marketing agencies that offered us to manage the launch as a paid service. From analyzing the strategies that were offered to employ, we quickly understood that the methods they use are often -

A) Irrelevant when trying to promote a product targeted to developers, as most of them have little experience in doing so and little understanding of the developer audience.

B) Not exactly ethical. Agencies tend to apply methods like using bots / false accounts to help inflate your voting numbers. Using strategies such as these will hurt your scoring, and you might not get picked for Product of the Day even if you have the most upvotes.
Don’t waste your time on cold calls/emails/DMs. Reach out to people who know you and your product, and ask them to reach out to people they know. Once we focused on reaching out to people who we knew would love to support us, it brought in great results.

Conclusion

People tend to be skeptical about the efficiency of doing a Product Hunt launch for developer tools. With our experience, we can say with a pretty high level of certainty that it was not only very beneficial in bringing in more users for our product, but it also taught us a lot about marketing for our audience in general. We hope that this blog will serve to aid those contemplating if it's worth putting in the effort into it and help you make a more informed decision.

Last note - We’d still appreciate your support

Even though we managed to achieve the Product of the Day ranking, we still continue to aim for the Product of the Week award. If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting us with a vote ♥️