Theresa Spengler

Last Saturday we launched Hardcover on PH. It was an amazing day, we had almost 300 votes which is huge for us. I want to share some learnings, as someone who works on a product that doesn't have an audience native to ProductHunt. 1. A clear description goes a long way Our marketing resources are limited, we're way more focused on building. So what you can do to make sure you get a lot of votes from people just browsing the products of the day is to have a clear description. 2. Explain to your audience what PH is This might seem obvious, but we've also realized that we were posting about our ProductHunt launch without people actually knowing what ProductHunt was. Or what 'support' meant. So we made sure we included 'a place for great products to get discovered' in most of our posts. 3. Share your mission We didn't just say what Hardcover is, and what it does for readers, but also our mission and long-term vision. You'll find many people relate to that more than they relate to features. 4. Post your founder story In many places outside PH, just posting about your launch can be annoying. On Reddit for example I posted about how I ended up working on Hardcover with Adam, our challenges, and how we made everything work. That mattered more than 'we're launching [x]' and people genuinely got interested in the story. 5. Clarity > accuracy We do a lot of things at Hardcover. If we were to talk about all of them, it would get confusing. This is a classic YC lesson, between being accurate and being clear, always choose clarity. It's mad how easy it is to mess this up with just a few wrong words, so be careful. I think those are the things that worked for us. Of course, try to be present and reply all day long. I was GMT, Adam was Mountain time, so we could cover responding to comments all day long. Hope this helped and good luck with your launch!