How to effectively launch your product on Product Hunt, according to science

Product Hunt is an essential venue for whoever wants to showcase products to an audience of investors, journalists, and tech fanatics in general. Launching on PH at the right time and in the right way can determine the success of a product. For this reason, social media analytics startup Popsters conducted a thorough statistical research on how to effectively launch your product on the popular website. We’re happy to share the insights of this research.

Methodology

The data was gathered thanks to Product Hunt’s API between August and October 2017. In total, the researchers analyzed 32,657 products that appeared on PH’s home-feed since November 2013. Of these projects, Popsters took in consideration data and time of publication, images, videos, tags, upvotes, interests of hunters, and position in the ranking. Before the findings, some clarifications on the scope of the research:

• The research did not consider comments
• Of course, different dates showed different numbers of products published. Because of this, it was useless to compare products by their absolute position in the ranking. To overcome the problem, researchers calculated the project’s proximity to the best ranked – calculating the percentage of gained engagement in relation to the day’s best-ranked
• In order to analyze only relevant data, Popsters filtered out products whose websites reported errors (404, 500,…), outdated SSL, redirection to hosting services, or outdated footers (2014 being the earliest year accepted). Additionally, it didn’t consider products whose websites had a views count below 5000
• Time considered is always Pacific Standard Time

Popsters found out that there were five key elements to a successful PH campaign:

1. Time of publication

Contrary to the popular belief that Tuesday is the best day to publish, Popsters found out that Sunday between 00:00 and 01:00 am appears to be the best time for posting on PH – if we consider both the chances to climb higher in the ranking and the upvotes count. At the opposite end, the worst days to publish are Wednesdays and Thursdays.

2. Tags

Projects with seven to nine tags perform better on average than projects with more or fewer tags.

3. Images

The researchers’ statistics show that it’s best to have up to eight or nine images. More than that can be risky.

 4. Videos

Predictably, projects that feature videos receive more upvotes and ranks better than projects without. 

5. Topics

“Branding” is the tag that on average attracts the highest number of upvotes. But you should do fine also if your product deals with venture capital and software engineering.

General statistics on Product Hunt

Popsters’researchers crunched a couple of other more general stats on PH. First off, they found out that projects receive on average more upvotes in the second quarter of the year (April to June).

Second, they also singled out the 30 most-active hunters by average upvotes count. Jack Dweck (product manager at Unroll.me), Niv Dror (content/marketing at Product Hunt/AngelList), and Ben Lang (marketing lead at Spoke) share the podium.

In conclusion, follow these stats and you’ll maximize the impact of your launch on Product Hunt. Publish at midnight on weekends with a video and eight to nine images. Also, try adding seven to nine tags to get your product into different topic feeds. Oh, and having an actually good product to launch will help too. — This article is brought to you by TNW X, our brand new b2b label. Are you a startup, corporate decisionmaker, or work in an ecosystem that could use an innovation boost? Check out tnw.co/x to see what we can do for you.