How to get featured on Product Hunt

Everyone dreams of making it to the front page of Product Hunt. It’s a chance to show off your creation to thousands of tech enthusiasts.

However, many people Hunt their product, wait for all the visitors to come… and nothing happens.

So how do I make it onto the front page?

Every product that is submitted gets looked at by a Product Hunt moderator. If your product is SUPER cool, the Product Hunt moderator will give you the ultimate blessing: Automatically featuring it on the front page, even with no upvotes at all. Keep in mind, they rarely choose to feature a product unless it has a filled out profile, so make sure you follow the basic instructions listed on the Product Hunt official blog.

The majority of submissions are not initially chosen to be featured.

Is there a way to tell if my product is going to be featured?

Yup, if your product is featured OR is going to be featured the next day, it will show FEATURED:

If your product has not yet been selected to be featured, it will show POSTED:

Okay, my product is definitely not featured. What can I do?

For products that don’t get automatically featured, you will need to get some upvotes. Not just any upvotes though, you need upvotes from some of the Product Hunt Power Users™ — someone who has a lot of upvotes, products made, products submitted, or ideally, all of these things. Click on a user to see these stats in their profile.

If you initially get a bunch of upvotes from people who have never used Product Hunt before, it might actually hurt more than it helps, because it signals to the algorithm that you are just spamming your non-tech friends. Upvotes from frequent Product Hunt users carry a LOT more weight than upvotes from new or infrequent users.

The best thing to do is get Product Hunt Power Users involved in your product BEFORE you launch. You can find many of them by combing through 500hunters.com. Give them something for free, and most of them will gladly support you with an upvote on launch day.

Can you give me an example?

Before we launched First 100 Influencers — a database listing top influencers, categorized by industry — on Product Hunt, we gave away a few free spots to Product Hunt Power Users and industry influencers.

This did two things:

1. It established credibility right away. Our site is now filled with Founders, CEOs, and big names like Andrew Warner from Mixergy, and John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur On Fire.
2. It gave us an army of people who would gladly give us an upvote.

Andrew Warner (above) and John Lee Dumas

When we originally posted the site to Product Hunt, we were not given the ultimate blessing of being featured right away. It wasn’t until receiving about 12 upvotes from our partnering Power Users that we were finally selected to be featured by the Product Hunt overlords.

I realize this approach is not feasible with every product or website, but the main takeaway is to build relationships and GIVE before you ASK.

This was written during the middle of launch day (2/21/18). If you want to see how we ended up doing on Product Hunt, here is the link: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/first-100-influencers

How to get featured on Product Hunt was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.