First time launching on Product Hunt; Here's a recap of our results being #2.

Here's our recap 👇

We launched Howdy this week, an AI-powered tool to send personal DMs at scale. It was our first time launching on Product Hunt. Here’s what happened in the first 24 hours:

🏆 Hit #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt

🚀 Added 200+ new accounts

📋 Users created 500+ lead lists

😇 Additional 1.8K active users on the landing page

📥 Over 75,000 Instagram profiles collected

How did we prepare?

🟣 Teaser Page

We launched a teaser page 2 weeks early to build momentum. This was key to getting our first wave of interest and creating early engagement with our community.

💡 Pro Tip: This is something we could've prepared even earlier; it's more important for the page to exist than for the date to be accurate.

🟣 Product Graphics

We spent over 20 hours crafting the visual storyline to reflected the product hunt user base. It proved to be massively important seeing all the support and engagement we got. Details really matter when the goal is to show that value in the first 3-5 seconds.

🟣 Engage

We had the whole team active in the PH community before launch, supporting other makers, replying to comments, and getting feedback from key players on Product Hunt. It really takes everyone on a small team to make something like this happen.

🎩 @ngorgiashvili @erolmujak @n1femi

🟣 Expert Guidance

Considering the last time I was on product hunt was when @rrhoover was running the ship, we reached out to @chrismessina for guidance due to his reach on the platform and relevance to our product. Chris provided insights to supportive products like Hunted.space.

Additionally, he gave us clarity on what to consider when launching and how to position the product in order to resonate better with the community.

🤔 Food for thought: It would have benefitted us to dig a little deeper earlier on and meet with other key members in the community so that we stayed top of mind.

What did we learn?

One of our key metrics that we track are message volume over 24 hours and we didn't see the spike that we thought would happen considering all our other leading indicators. What we realized was that we didn't provide enough materials to help users more freely create list and configure campaigns. We're now working on a video using @Clueso that will hopefully help users send more messages faster.

Additionally we didn't have a support chat for users to ask questions so we will be adding @Chatwoot to provide realtime support.

What are we proud of?

Our engagement strategy was well thought out and solid. The whole team stayed active across time zones, balancing energy and sharing the load. We responded to nearly every comment in real time and had great convos with the community.

What did your launch teach you?

If you’ve launched recently, we’d love to hear your wins, misses, and lessons👇

Also curious…

Has anyone tried paid advertising on Product Hunt?

If so, we would appreciate any comments, feedbacks, or insights as this is something we are considering.