What I Learned From My First Product Hunt Launch: A Non-Tech Founder’s Journey

Have you ever taken on something so far outside your usual skill set that you start to wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into? Like when you agree to bake a five-tier cake even though your usual specialty is toast? That was me with our recent Product Hunt launch—minus the frosting and flour, add a mountain of challenges I never expected to face.

Who’s This Non-Tech Founder Anyway?

Let me set the scene. I’m a non-technical founder, the kind who thrives on marketing strategies and business development meetings rather than coding marathons or product design sprints. My daily routine? No 5 a.m. wake-ups, no cold showers. In fact, if you’re one of those tech bros who swear by those things, I probably have you muted on LinkedIn and Twitter. But here I was, launching our B2B SaaS on Product Hunt—a platform that’s as much a mystery to me as mercury retrograde.

But here’s the kicker: I decided to do it all with a zero-dollar budget. Yep, no paid promotions, no fancy agency hires. Just me, my laptop, and a whole lot of resourcefulness. And you know what? We held the number two spot for the entire first half of the day and remained in the top three until the last 30 minutes of voting. Ultimately, we ended up fifth overall for our efforts and generated a ton of customer feedback without spending a single dime.

The Product Hunt Ecosystem: Bigger Than I Imagined

I have to admit, when I started this journey 10 days before the launch, I wasn’t fully aware of how vast and complex the Product Hunt ecosystem really is. I began by joining LinkedIn groups, following active Product Hunt users, and engaging in community conversations. It didn’t take long before I started getting flooded with outreach messages—hundreds of them, from people offering to help me “guarantee” a successful launch. Who knew there was an entire industry built around this?

And here’s where it gets interesting: There are two types of paid services out there.

• High-End Agencies and Top Hunters: These folks don’t outright promise upvotes, but they do offer consultation and so called “positioning” services. Their services often come with price tags that start in the thousands of dollars.

• Lower-Cost Outreach Providers: Mostly individuals with LinkedIn profiles based in India or Pakistan, these providers offer outreach services and upvotes at a fraction of the cost. They’re persistent, tracking your ranking and timing their outreach perfectly, sometimes even guaranteeing votes.

I’m not here to pass judgment on these services—whether they’re worth $500 or $5,000 is up to you. But I will say this: There’s no clear correlation between your ranking on Product Hunt and how good your product is (whatever that means). In fact, I saw super niche tools climbing to the top while some big-name startups didn’t even make a splash.

So, who are the people driving these rankings? Let’s talk about the three types of upvoters on Product Hunt.

Three Types of Upvoters: The Enthusiasts, the Fellow Founders, and the Paid Providers

Let’s talk about the people behind the upvotes. From what I’ve seen, there are three types of upvoters on Product Hunt:

1. The Real Product Enthusiasts: These are the early adopters, the ones who genuinely love discovering new tools. They sign up, try your product, and give you honest feedback without asking for anything in return. These folks and their feedback are gold.

2. The Fellow Founders: I’d put myself in this category. These are other founders who aren’t deeply involved in the Product Hunt community but are motivated by a sense of camaraderie. They upvote your product because they know the struggle and might need your support when it’s their turn. This group is driven by a sincere desire to support fellow entrepreneurs.

3. The Paid Service Providers: You can spot these folks a mile away. They’re super active, reaching out to you before you even realize you need them, and they’re not shy about offering their services. During my launch, I received over 100 messages from these providers, ranging from sketchy to maybe legit, but it’s hard to know for sure.

Employing a Strategic Approach

Once you’ve defined your objective, that’s when you put the strategy into action. And like any good recipe, it requires the right ingredients. For us, it boiled down to two key tools: Phantom Buster and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

• Phantom Buster: This was our go-to tool for scraping data from LinkedIn, helping us identify and connect with potential supporters in the Product Hunt community.

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: We used this to find and engage with specific LinkedIn users who were likely to be interested in our launch, allowing us to build a network of potential upvoters.

That was it. No fancy email campaigns, no expensive tools—just these two ingredients, carefully combined and timed to align with our objective of driving upvotes and traffic.

We started by scraping the LinkedIn profiles of users who were active in Product Hunt-focused groups. These were the folks who were either seasoned Product Hunt users or had shown a keen interest in new product launches. By extracting this data, we were able to create a list of potential supporters who were already engaged with the platform and likely to take an interest in our launch.

Next, we didn’t stop at just collecting data from LinkedIn groups. We also scraped the profiles of Product Hunt users who had recently upvoted similar products on Product Hunt. This included not just the upvoters but also the makers behind those products. By gathering information on these individuals, we built a targeted outreach list of people who were already inclined to support new tech initiatives.

With this data in hand, we set up personalized outreach messages using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. We connected with these users, explained our product and its value, and invited them to check out our launch. The strategy was simple: reach out to people who were already active in the community and engage them with a genuine message.

By carefully timing (not pushing all at the same time to avoid lowering our ranking in the algorithm) our outreach efforts and engaging with the right people, we were able to generate meaningful traffic and upvotes without relying on expensive tools or services.

Setting the Scene on Launch Day

Here’s something you might not expect: the need to pivot your outreach strategy on the fly. On our launch day, everything was set, but within the first few hours, I noticed something that made me rethink our approach.

A major startup, with a big version 3 release, was also launching that day. You could tell they were going all out—one of the top hunters, known for offering very expensive paid services, had just hunted their product, and they were quickly climbing the ranks. By the third or fourth hour, I realized that despite this, we were holding our own—we were sitting comfortably in the number two spot. More importantly, the outreach we had done was working.

Despite the competition, we held our own. We ended up with a strong fifth-place ranking, gathering 430 upvotes (and still counting) along the way. But what really stood out? We received 219 comments—more than double the number of comments on the products ranked second, third, and fourth. It was clear that our product resonated with the community, sparking meaningful conversations and genuine interest.

People were engaging with our product, not just upvoting, but actually interacting with us, validating the product, and asking insightful questions. What struck me was the quality of engagement. These weren’t just numbers on a leaderboard; these were real people, genuinely interested in what we had to offer. They were commenting without us prompting them, helping us refine our pitch, and even answering questions from other users. It was clear that our audience wasn’t made up of AI bots or paid outreach services—they were the real deal.

No matter how much you plan, something unexpected will come up. Maybe it’s a major competitor launching on the same day, or maybe it’s a wave of unexpected support. Stay flexible, keep an eye on the rankings, and engage with your community. Your audience will tell you more about the success of your launch than any number of upvotes ever could.

The Results: What We Learned

So, what did all this effort get us? More than 1,000 unique users visited our website on launch day, and we managed to convert about 6% of them into sign-ups. That might sound modest, but here’s the kicker: the majority of these sign-ups came from users with work emails that included crucial keywords like “media.” This tells us that these are real, valuable customers—exactly the kind of users we were hoping to attract.

We’re now in the process of onboarding these early customers, improving the onboarding journey, and making enhancements based on the feedback we’ve received. These initial users are helping us shape the future of our product, and we’re taking everything we’ve learned from this launch to acquire more customers and continue growing.

Would I Do It All Over Again?

Given everything I’ve shared—the planning, the pivoting, the relentless focus on strategy—would I do it all over again? HELL YEAH! I’m a founder, after all. My life is all about trials, experimentations, learnings, and execution. Every challenge is an opportunity to grow, and every launch is a chance to refine the process. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the journey is just as important as the destination.