By Owen Fay . Posted on July 26, 2022If you had joined us in the office a few months ago today, you would have found a team looking for a way to boost awareness, increase traffic, and honestly get some validation that we had a really good service to offer. Flash forward two months and the Google Headline Optimizer by Poll the People was Product Hunt’s #1 product of the day on July 20, 2022. How did we do it?
In the spirit of full disclosure, let’s start at the very beginning. We’d been discussing how to launch our company until it struck us: why not launch the cool new tool in development? Kill two birds with one stone: launch the Google Headline Optimizer and get firsthand experience of the ins and outs of a (hopefully successful) Product Hunt launch. The goal was set: the #1 product of the day on Product Hunt for the Google Headline Optimizer.
How did we get there? It took a lot of research, planning, and hard work (plus a little luck). We’ll dive into a short guide to achieving the #1 Product of the Day status (which comes with a feature in the widely-dispersed newsletter, marketing tools, and yes, bragging rights). But before we dive in I’ll give you a short explanation of the tool and how it can help marketers, designers, and many other parts of a business.
The Google Headline Optimizer
The Google Headline Optimizer by Poll the People allows you to write user-friendly headlines that drive clicks. Optimize your headlines by tying them directly to your keywords and targets.
An ad headline is like a handshake. If it’s firm, you’ll leave a good impression. Limp-fish and you’ll look nervous. This is why a headline is the most important part of a Google ad, you might have an amazing product, but if you aren’t capturing the user’s attention with the headline, you aren’t going to get clicks.
On average, around 80% of people only read headlines when they are searching on Google. You can capture 80% of your audience simply by using a powerful headline. You shouldn’t leave such an impactful decision to guesswork or a small team.
Our quick and easy solution: the Google Headline Optimizer tool. Using our enterprise AI-backed software, the tool will generate headlines that tie directly to your keywords and accomplish all the goals of an effective Google ad headline. All you need to do is enter your keyword and watch the magic happen. We will give you a comprehensive list of headline suggestions.
Once your headlines are generated, you can test two of them with Poll the People’s user testing platform. The testing tools allow you to gather real feedback from real people in under an hour, for less than other user testing platforms.
Now that you know about the tool and how to use it to create powerful Google ad headlines, we’ll jump into how we got the #1 product of the day on Product Hunt.
How Poll the People Became the Product of the Day
Step 1: Research
Before you start creating your plan for launching or making a launch page, you and your team should do your research on the best ways to launch, the requirements from Product Hunt, and how to be successful once your product goes live.
When we decided to launch the Google Headline Optimizer, we started by understanding the Product Hunt platform, and the best practices for a launch, and read our fair share of articles on successful and unsuccessful launches.
Step 2: We Built a Following and Engaged with the Product Hunt Community
The research was clear: it’s vital to build a community heading into the launch. You can build your own following by engaging with the Product Hunt community, and that is exactly what we did. We needed to get the word out before expending time and resources on the launch and tool itself.
We began engaging with the community by checking out products, giving feedback, and commenting on discussions. The discussion section on Product Hunt can be great for learning about what others are doing, how others launch their product, and anything else business related. Don’t be selfish: your engagement doesn’t always have to be about you, and a lot of our outreach wasn’t just about us.
Some people take this tip loosely, simply saying “Congrats” on every product and hoping for a follow. (Having followers on Product Hunt is helpful because all of the followers get a notification when you launch a product.)
Instead of being lazy about engagement, we spent some time each day creating meaningful connections with makers, the community, and hunters, providing thoughtful feedback on products, answering questions, and asking our own questions that helped us and others.
This definitely helped once we launched, as we had users that we could reach out to and connections that we knew would help us out. We gave a lot of makers a follow and got some back, sometimes connecting on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Step 3: Work Towards Success
One of the biggest tips for being successful on PH is to have a concrete plan and follow it. If you rush the process, don’t build a following, or just have bad resources, you won’t get to the #1 product of the day. You need to make a great product and have a killer launch page with great images, description, headline, etc.
While there will inevitably be some scrambling in the day or two leading up to the launch, having everything on a timeline will help alleviate some stress. Some of the most important things to plan include:
- Launch Date – set a date and stick to it, PH is on a PST schedule so you should launch at 12:01 am PST.
- Headline & Description – Have a headline that explains the product in one sentence, it needs to be engaging and informative.
- Great Creative – Craft some images that visually describe the product. Don’t count on people taking the time to read the description, a picture is worth a thousand words. A video for the product is optional but does help with a launch.
- First comment – the first comment is a long description of the product. Make sure you have one that tells users a brief background story, the market problem that exists, and how your product can fix that problem.
Step 4: We Connected with Existing Contacts Pre-Launch
Now that we were active in the PH community, had created a launch page, and accompanying resources, and were gaining attention, we started leveraging every contact (personal and professional) to prepare them for our launch.
We created an outreach spreadsheet, including current users, friends, family, professional connections, and anyone else that might have helped us. The list was big, so it took some time to reach out to everyone, but personal messages mean more, and the effort was worth it.
This is a good time to discuss and ask for support once you launch, a high number of upvotes is essential to becoming the Product of the Day. The upvotes and comments are how PH ranks the launches so using every contact is important.
With that being said, don’t try to “game the system”, Product Hunt will delete votes or rank you lower if you buy votes, use bots, or a suspicious jump in votes or comment to upvote ratio. The people that help you need to be real.
We found that getting a good number of votes in the first few hours of a launch means a lot. About 50-100 upvotes in the first hours will put you in the top 5-10 products, meaning when others go to the site they will see your product, getting you more votes.
Step 5: We Launched the Product
When our launch day finally arrived, we were prepared to do everything we needed to ensure we had a successful Product Hunt launch. We had our launch scheduled for 12:01 am PST, had our first comment ready to post, and our website ready to take more traffic.
We were ready to answer questions, respond to every comment, and reach out to everyone that we knew to help us get to the #1 spot. To make sure we got as many eyes on the launch here are a few things we had ready:
- Two scheduled emails to go out to all of our existing users.
- Three social media posts to go out at different times throughout the day.
- A message to send to Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Quora groups.
- Copy to send out to influencers, contacts, and any other people that could help.
As the day went on, we saw that our efforts were working, but made sure to keep pushing to finish the day at the number 1 spot. We ended up with about 600 upvotes and 100 comments, we beat the second-place product by a decent margin but the work throughout the whole day is what made the launch day a true success.
It was time for us to celebrate!
Final Thoughts
Launching on Product Hunt was a huge learning experience! There were ups and downs, stress, excitement, and so many other emotions, but overall, we’re very happy with the results. We continue to research Product Hunt launch tactics, look at the things we can do differently next time, and find new tactics for another launch in the future.
There are so many factors that come into play when launching a product, and many of them aren’t in your control. Poll the People had a good plan for launching and worked hard to be successful, but in the end, we got a little bit of luck.
No launch is perfect, but if you make a good product, leverage your relationships, and work hard on launch day, you might end up with a great accomplishment.
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