What not to do
These usually come down to marketing. The solution: Don’t be spammy.
Do not ask for upvotes anywhere
Feel free to ask for feedback, but asking for upvotes is a big no-no. People should upvote the product because they like it, not because they’re peer pressured into doing so.
Don’t spam people
Mass-tweeting/emailing people unsolicited, asking for feedback or upvotes, even if they’ve upvoted similar products in the past isn’t effective. If your timeline is filled with dozens of identical messages, that is not the way to go about it. Be authentic. 😊
Thunderclap
On a similar note, tools like Thunderclap that shout about your launch are notoriously ineffective — it comes across as spammy, and the super secret algorithm doesn’t like spammy.
Finding a “Hunter”
Feel free to hunt your own product. Having someone else posting is fine, but spending lots of time “finding a hunter” is a distraction. You know your product better than anyone else, and it makes very little difference who hunts the product and how well it performs overall.
Linking to “ producthunt.com ”.
Link directly to your product page. Linking to “ producthunt.com ” only makes it harder for people to find you and doesn’t have any effect on the algorithm at all. It seems to be “common knowledge” that you’re punished for linking directly to your product page — it’s simply not true. Focus on communicating what your product does.
P.S. Linking to producthunt.com is one of the clearest indications you may be “over-optimizing” your launch (gaming the system).
A note on this section
To be clear, it’s important to share your product and get the word out. The core metric we’re working toward as a company is directly related to people discovering your product. Our interests are aligned.
What we’re trying to avoid is behavior that hurts the community, like unsolicited mass outreach (spamming people) or trying to game the system to get more upvotes (what the community finds “popular”).
P.S. This kind of behavior is very easy to spot (and often corroborated by screenshots that people send us). Also, please keep in mind that upvotes that are considered by the system as spammy can end up damaging to the overall ranking.
You’re better off focusing on authentic ways of connecting with users and thinking of creative ways of promoting your product. In the next sections we’ll cover what we’ve seen work particularly well for makers, including what you can start doing ahead of time. 💫