Hunting process
The Product Hunt homepage is organized into two different lists of hunted products: “Popular” and “Newest.” Every product that is hunted appears in the Newest tab, but only the most popular products appear in the Popular section (hence the name 😉). It’s everybody’s goal to get featured, but if you follow the steps above your chances of being featured on the homepage will increase.
There are two ways to get your product hunted: hunt it yourself or ask someone else to hunt it for you. People often hunt products they like without contacting the makers first, so if your product is out in the wild, we recommend submitting to Product Hunt sooner rather than later. Generally, the community is eager to discover cool new products first, even if they’re not “perfect”.
Hunt Your Own Product
As mentioned earlier, please hunt your own product, it will save you time, and give you full control over launch day logistics. It can actually hurt your chances if you cold email, DM, or tweet at random hunters asking for their help. We spend all day on Twitter and see when founders/companies inauthentically spam community members (this matters because the same group of people often get approached, some multiple times a day).
The Hunter
On a related note, it makes little difference who hunts the product. It used to matter, back in the day when we sent email notification to the hunter’s followers, but we stopped doing that a long time ago. Your time is better spent gathering a small group of people months in advance that are excited about what you are building, rather than an “influencer” who may have little context.
Best Time To Post
There is no single best time, but there are considerations to keep in mind. The homepage is based on a 24 hour cycle, new products hit the homepage at 12:01am PST and are added throughout the day. Product Hunt does not adjust for time zones so be sure to double check you are launching at the time you’d like to in PST. There is no “magic” time to post, but it’s best practice to do it before 9am PT so there’s enough time in the day for people to discover and discuss your latest creation. If you decide to schedule your post ahead of time, that time is also based on PST.
Example 1: The Boring Company
Great thumbnail and gallery video, both communicating what the product does well.
Name
The name of the company. Perfect 👌
Tagline
“Elon Musk’s new company, creating tunnels for traffic” — the tagline is straight to the point and self-explanatory.
Description
“The Boring Company is an infrastructure and tunneling company founded by Elon Musk to cut down on traffic & improve our vehicular transportation.” Again, straight to the point & self-explanatory.
Topics
The three topics (Cars, Transportation, Tech) all directly relate to the actual product (a network of underground tunnels for cars).
Thumbnail
The thumbnail (a GIF, in this case) clearly demonstrates the product’s functionality and core features.
Gallery
The gallery includes a YouTube video showcasing the product and a number of pictures/GIFs that help frame its functionality.
Media
Three different articles are included, each offering a different aspect of the company’s progress. Anything that illustrates your company’s mission, progress, and tells the story of what you’re about.
Makers
Still waiting for Elon to jump on… but we can confirm that he received the two Golden Kitty trophies we sent him. 📬
Example 2: Polymail
Links
The page links directly to the Polymail website and the download links to the App Store.
Name
Again, just the name of the product (Polymail).
Tagline
Correctly capitalized with a clear description of their core product.
Description
Two concise, clear sentences about the core product offering & the suite of features that Polymail offers.
Topics
They added the correct number of Topics (2–4) — an iOS/Mac email app is a good fit for Productivity, Email, and Tech.
Thumbnail
Even without a flashy GIF as their thumbnail, Polymail received 4700 upvotes and a Golden Kitty Award at the end of the year. Sometimes, a simple logo is all you need.
Gallery
The Polymail team put together some screenshots from the core app features of the app (with interesting text if you look closely). Custom PH-themed GIFs or images seem to always do well. 😉
Makers
The entire team is added as Makers, not just the founder or CEO.
Social Links
The Polymail team added in their AngelList, GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, and Medium accounts.
Comment
Brandon’s comment is short, informative, and humble — a wonderful tone to strike when launching. He offered a clear explanation of the core differentiation between Polymail and its competitors as well.
Offer
The Polymail team spent all day inviting Product Hunt users who commented with invite codes to their beta. This is a great example of an offer that the community loves (early access), distributed in a public way that generates interest and encourages others to try out the product.
It worked out.