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After three months of launching Floik’s beta, I knew we were ready to go public and take Floik to the world. We wanted to get real user feedback, maximize our development efforts, and accelerate our path to product-market fit.
Launching on Product Hunt was the best next step because our product is fully self-serve with a freemium model. A PH launch fully aligned with our goal of driving bottoms-up adoption.
Having seen the massive effort it takes for a successful Product Hunt launch, I knew it was going to be a mountain to climb. But when I found my first GTM hires in May, I was confident (and excited) to take the leap. 💪🏻
So, here’s a complete breakdown of how we planned this mission and earned the precious Product of the Day and Week badges with a massively successful launch.
Early in June, we set a provisional launch date for launching Floik on July 26. Setting this date helped us chalk out a timeline and organize our planning efforts.
Once we knew the D-day, we put on our nerd hats to learn everything about Product Hunt. To gain some hands-on experience, we put our learnings to action with two sidecar products.
But these weren’t random products created for the sake of experimentation.
In our beta phase, we discovered that customer success teams loved Floik the most. So, we decided to delight this persona by designing two products to make life easier for them.
Our first product launch wasn’t one for the books. But it taught us a huge lesson: it’s important to schedule a launch 24-48 hours before the launch day.
Despite its mediocre success, this launch built great awareness for Floik, brought traffic to our website, and kick-started our email list.
Our second product was a hit and became the #4 Product of the Day. We gained great visibility and each one of us started building our network on PH.
💡Launching these sidecars before our main launch was a great dress rehearsal to prepare for the final show!
As we entered July, we built a command center for all things Product Hunt on Notion. This massive database covered every little detail for our launch, including:
👉🏻 A week-wise timeline in the run-up to D-day and a launch-day timeline
👉🏻 All must-have items before launch, like a 100% ready help center and seamless website
👉🏻 Some good-to-have items for the launch, like publishing blogs on relevant themes
👉🏻 A comprehensive distribution plan before, during, and after the launch day
Here’s a sneak peek into our command center:
A critical part of our prep was actively engaging with the PH community and building rapport. We genuinely wanted to give back to the makers before asking for their support.
So, our team set daily reminders to check out all new launches on Product Hunt, leave upvotes + helpful comments, and contribute to discussions (an overlooked part of the platform). We also connected with some active PH contributors on LinkedIn and introduced them to Floik.
Our team also set their goals of making the product launch-ready and bug-free. We did multiple rounds of deployments and testing to ensure everything worked seamlessly!
Two weeks into July, we finalized August 1 as our launch date and requested Kevin to be our Hunter. He shared some amazing tips for us to strengthen our planning!
💡Choosing a hunter was superb for getting a visibility boost since all of Kevin's 14k+ followers were notified about our launch.
Our focus was now on chatting with all beta users to understand their main use cases for Floik and the benefits they experienced. These conversations helped us narrow down the top value propositions to spotlight in our design collateral. We also got some cool testimonials!
Besides engaging actively with the PH community, we started building a list of all communities and connections in our network.
It was a good way to organize our outreach efforts on the launch day and we warmed up these communities to avoid sounding too salesy on the main day. We also mapped the time zones for all our supporters to ensure we hit them at their most active hours!
A week before the launch, we designed all the collateral for the launch after looking at hundreds of PH listings.
💡We put in the extra effort to stand out from the crowd with an animated profile picture for our entire team — and it all paid off!
We also designed a bunch of posts, videos, and GIFs to create some buzz before our launch. Our team was constantly sharing these messages on Slack and WhatsApp communities.
On another note, we reflected on our conversations with beta users to create a list of potential questions that PH users might ask about Floik. Once this list was ready, we created short answers to respond to every query quickly on launch day! Never hurts to be just a little bit more prepared.
But the biggest highlight of our prep was building a balanced distribution plan for actively engaging and amplifying our launch on D-day. 🤝🏻
We created a team roster dividing the day between the four of us. Each member was assigned five slots to be the main POC for our launch with two key goals —
This way, we covered 20 hours of the launch day and built consistent momentum throughout the day. We also made sure we leveraged our networks to the fullest without any overlaps.
We started our launch day with pizza🍕 in one hand and our laptops💻 in another! We were absolutely buzzing and ready to get that #1 Product of the Day badge.
In the first hour of our launch, when Product Hunt didn't disclose the ranks, we sat in fourth place — bummer! But we didn’t want to panic and play all our cards so early in the game.
So, we kept our cool, followed the roster, and actively engaged with all the people commenting on our listing. Each member waited for their turn to tap into their network and activate their connections + communities. And it worked like magic!
Four hours into our launch day, we were #1 and the team celebrated with some slick dance moves🏆
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Besides reaching out to our connections and communities, we leveraged LinkedIn and Twitter to spread the word about our launch.
We posted from our official company handles and our founders also posted multiple updates on our launch day progress. Here’s one of the best highlights:
We kept building the momentum of upvotes and reached out to our connections in Asia + Europe all through the day.
Our tech team was active throughout the day to handle any issues and answer technical queries. They even chatted with users who signed up on launch day and wanted to explore the product. We responded to every support request within minutes to welcome new users with a frictionless experience!
As we approached the night and the West woke up, we shifted our outreach to our supporters in the US market to consistently bring in more votes. This was probably one of the most satisfying all-nighters we’ve pulled!
In hindsight, it feels unbelievable to know that a four-member team managed to get 1200+ votes and 500+ comments (and counting)!
But if we’ve learned one thing from this amazing milestone, it’s that timely planning and execution can set you up for massive success on Product Hunt.
You definitely don’t need to run ads, splurge money on agencies, or start influencer collabs to get those upvotes. Make a strong gameplan — or take inspiration from ours — and go get that bread! 💪🏻
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Floik helps in creating customized self-serve interactive demos, product videos and step-by-step guides in minutes on a single platform
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