How to Launch an App on Product Hunt: Prep, Assets and Launch Day

Quick answer: To launch an app on Product Hunt, join the community weeks ahead, prepare a page with a clear tagline, thumbnail, landscape gallery images and a personal maker comment, and schedule the launch for a day you can be online from midnight Pacific Time. On the day, share it with your own audience, ask for feedback rather than votes, and answer every comment. No preparation guarantees a top spot.

Product Hunt's audience is makers, early adopters and people who enjoy trying new tools. A launch there can bring early users, honest feedback, conversations with other founders and links to your site. It works best when:

• Your app solves a problem tech-savvy people recognize, such as productivity, design, development, writing, finance or health tracking.
• You can explain what is new in one sentence.
• The app is live and installable today, or at least has a public beta.
• You have some audience of your own to tell on the day.

It works less well for apps aimed at a narrow local market or a non-technical audience who will never visit the site. In that case, treat Product Hunt as a side channel in your wider app launch plan, not the main event.

Set realistic goals. "Get 50 pieces of feedback and 200 new signups" is a better target than "finish first", which depends on what else launches that day and on Product Hunt's own curation.

Product Hunt rewards people who are part of the community, not accounts that appear on launch day.

1. Create your maker account early and complete your profile with a photo and a real bio.
2. Take part. Comment thoughtfully on other launches in your space for a few weeks. You learn what good pages look like.
3. Decide who posts. You can post your own product as the maker; you do not need a famous hunter.
4. Build a list of supporters: beta testers, newsletter subscribers and friends who genuinely use the app. Plan a short, personal message for each group.
5. Make sure the app is live in the App Store and Google Play, with links that work in every country you target.
6. Prepare an offer if it fits, such as an extended trial for Product Hunt visitors.

Here is what to prepare, with the sizes Product Hunt's launch guide has recommended at the time of writing. Check the submission form for current limits.

Taglines that work are concrete: "Plan your week in 2 minutes" says more than "The future of productivity". Avoid hype words and exclamation marks. Your first comment should sound like a person, not a press release: what problem you had, what you built, what makes it different and one specific question for the community.

You already have the best material for your gallery: your store screenshots. The catch is that they are portrait and the gallery is landscape. Some layouts that convert portrait screens into a landscape frame:

• Hero shot. One device mockup on the left, your headline and two or three benefits on the right.
• Three-up. Three portrait screenshots side by side on a branded background, each with a short caption.
• Feature close-up. One screen with a zoomed callout on the feature people will care about most.
• Before and after. The messy old way next to your app's result.
• Platform shot. iPhone and Android devices together, if you launch on both.

Order the gallery like a story: what it is, the main benefit, two or three key features, then social proof or your offer. Keep text large, because many visitors browse on a phone. Transparent device mockups from our free mockup generator drop straight onto any background, and the device mockup guide covers angles and colors.

Product Hunt's day runs from midnight to midnight Pacific Time, so a launch posted just after midnight gets the full 24 hours on the front page. You can schedule the launch in advance from the submission form.

There is no magic weekday. Weekdays usually bring more visitors and more competition; quieter days can give a small product more room to be noticed. Choose based on your goal, avoid major holidays and big tech events, and pick a day when you and your team can be online for most of the 24 hours.

Line up the rest of your launch around it: a newsletter that day, social posts in your audience's time zones and, if you have them, press stories timed for the same week.

1. Go live just after midnight Pacific and post your maker comment straight away.
2. Tell your own audience with a short message and a direct link. Ask people to check it out and leave feedback.
3. Do not ask for upvotes or organize vote swaps. Product Hunt discourages direct requests for votes, and suspicious voting can hurt a launch.
4. Reply to every comment, quickly and specifically. Thank people, answer questions and note feature requests.
5. Post updates during the day on social media with something new each time: a demo clip, a customer quote, a behind-the-scenes photo.
6. Watch your app's support inbox and crash reports, because new users arrive from everywhere at once.
7. Write down every piece of feedback in one place so you can act on it the next week.

Thank everyone who commented, personally if you can. Follow up on feature requests and tell people when you ship them. Add the strongest feedback to your roadmap and the clearest new users' quotes, with permission, to your landing page.

Then return to the channels that compound: your store listing, your keyword work and steady community presence. Our guide to app marketing on a budget covers what to do next, and the App Store submission checklist helps when you ship the update full of launch feedback.