Product Hunt launches for cause and family products

We take Product Hunt launches where the day itself is not the point. For a cause or family product a top-five finish has meant, across the launches we have run, between nine hundred and two thousand five hundred visitors on the day and roughly a fifth of that over the following week. It is worth managing for what it seeds - the newsletter mentions, the first two journalists, a marketplace reviewer, the funder who opens the page before a call - and not for the traffic. If your board expects a step change in sign-ups on launch day, decline this and spend the money on something that can produce one. The work: Date selection against the competitive calendar, including the weeks the sector's larger products have already booked. Live at 12:01am Pacific with the maker comment written days earlier, in the founder's own words, edited for a reader who has never heard of you. A gallery built for the feed, where the first image is often all anybody sees. The tagline in sixty characters, which is the hardest sentence of the engagement and takes several sittings to get honest. Then comment operations: a staffed rota answering within twenty minutes for the first six hours and through the rest of the day, in English and French. Around the launch: We line up the parts that matter more than the ranking. The people who will genuinely post - users, partner organisations, the platform teams you already work with, never a pod - briefed a week ahead on what they can say truthfully. A press note written for someone who does not care about Product Hunt. A page that answers the single question a stranger arrives with, and one action they can finish in two minutes. For a nonprofit or a free tool there is no pricing page to send anyone to, so we decide that action first and build the day backwards from it. What we refuse: No hunter-for-hire, no vote groups, no pods, no followers bought before launch, no staff comments that hide the relationship. The platform discounts votes from accounts with no history and has removed products for coordination, but the better reason is that the readers worth having can tell, and they are the same people deciding later whether to write about you. We also decline to run the same product through a second launch to chase a better placement; the audience notices, and the second number is never read as a first. Who this is not for: Waitlists and prototypes. A launch spends attention you cannot get back, and aiming it at a signup form for something that does not exist converts interest into a lapsed email address. Also not for teams who cannot free two people for the day. We run the rota, but the maker has to be present and it has to be visibly them. What you receive: A launch plan with the date and the reasoning behind it. Every asset: gallery, tagline, description, maker comment, first-day updates, and French versions where they help. The support list briefed and tracked. Rota cover on the day itself. A written read the week after that separates what the launch produced from what it merely coincided with, and a short list of the follow-ups worth making - the three or four people from that day who are worth an email in February.