Behind 900 pushups, lessons learned from being #1 Product of the Day

Background

We finally decided to launch on Product Hunt after 1.5 years of building Helicone. With zero Product Hunt launch experience, our team managed to get #1 Product of the Day by focusing on creative ways to activate our audience.

A week before our launch, Stefan tweeted as a joke that for every upvote Helicone gets, he’s going to do a push-up. Turns out our whole team wants to join in on the suffering. We also handed out cookies in San Francisco and connected with all of our customers.

We didn’t know what we were doing, but hopefully this will either inspire you or be a fun read.

Read Product Hunt’s whole article here.

A Rollercoaster Ride

TL;DR: Bots attacked, abandoned ramen and damage control.

Our votes got slashed by 200 throughout the day (due to bot upvotes which we didn’t expect). Our biggest hit was around 8pm pst while our team went for dinner. Justin (Helicone’s CEO) documented what happened that day on X and how we reclaimed #1.

We highly recommend monitoring the upvotes on hunted.space on launch day. It helped us to know when to relax, when to push harder etc.

Preparation

Tip #1: Warm up your audience weeks before launch

Having a solid profile mattered, but not as much as warming up our audience weeks leading up to the launch. For us, it meant having a social media schedule that starts 1 month before launch.

Here’s a simple skeleton, you can always expand on it:

• 1 post announcing your “Coming soon” page
• 1 post about your personal journey
• at least 1 post on launch day
• 1 post after launch day thanking your community

This was our content schedule:

Why your profile doesn’t matter as much as you may think:

Cole spend countless of hours creating a killer demo video, only for it to get 33 views. To put things into perspective, we got close to 800 upvotes at the end of launch day. Most of our support came from our distribution channels like social media, cold outreach and emails.

Tip #2: Strategize around your objective

Our goal with the Product Hunt launch was to increase user conversion and awareness. Getting #1 product of the day was a nice-to-have.

What worked for us :)

• Being super responsive in the comments (highlighting our competitive advantage in the replies).
• Responding to comments in a way that gets our customers to continue interacting/commenting back.
• Reaching out to everyone in our office building.
• Building momentum throughout the day (we were #4 at 7am, but our growth was faster than other companies).
• Treating PH launch as team bonding — even if it’s push-ups, remember to have fun!
• Speaking at events leading up to the launch.

What can be improved

Cole created a detailed guide on how we plan to automate Product Hunt outreach in the future. Some key takeaways:

• Automating outreach for Linkedin and X.
• Emailing our users earlier in the morning (like 8am) — we emailed around noon so the open rate was not high.
• Finding a way to push a little harder from 12am-4am
• Setting up drips throughout the day (via email / LinkedIn) — companies with launch experience do this.

Our experience getting to #1

Most people will tell you the initial 4 hours (between 12:01am - 4am) matter most as it sets the ranking. We didn’t invest too heavily in this. At 6am, we were fluctuating between #3 and #4. The gap between us and #2 was increasing so we thought that if we get #3, we’d be content.

Throughout the day, we started getting more traffic. Our team took a detour to our office’s basement and the Salesforce park to do as many pushups as the number of upvotes we got. We recorded them and posted them on the social media. It was so silly but a lot of fun. That got some of our friends and customers invested. We saw a closing gap between us (#3) and #2. It gave us hope that maybe, just maybe we can reach #2. #2 was only 10-20 votes from #1. If we can get #2, we can try for #1 too.

Unexpected surprises

• The amount of support from our existing customers
• The number of people who told us “hey I know Helicone”
• Meeting other startup founders as we handed out cookies across San Francisco.
• Meeting very genuine people who are not in tech but just wanted to help out.
• The amount of connections our team was able to reach during the last hours.

Results

• Before the Product Hunt launch, we had a consistent 10-15 user signups each day.
• On launch day (and the day after), we had 50-60 sign ups.
• We also 3x’ed user conversion from the Free plan to Growth plan.

Learnings

• Getting creative with marketing and trying a lot of things within a limited time.
• It was amazing to see how well our team worked together under pressure.
• Product Hunt launches are good opportunities to go out and talk to people who might be your ICPs. Practice your pitch and see if they understand your product in the amount of time it takes to choose a cookie.
• Get good quality cookies! (We recommend Insomnia cookies)
• Monitor your upvotes on hunted.space. In case you experience a significant drop due to bots like we did, you can hop on damage control immediately.

Left: Team pushups. Right: Damage control at 11pm after we lost 200 votes.

In general, people were very willing to support us. In terms of conversion, it was worth it for a day of work for the team, and a month of passive preparation — one person on your team could likely spearhead this. If anything, we treated this more as a team bonding activity, a chance for the whole team to tell our network about the awesome product we’ve been building, and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone to see what’s possible (by either talking to strangers or through cold messaging). The best surprises after all, are the ones that come from ourselves.

Good luck on your launch! We’d love to learn about your experience, and let us know if we can help in any way. 🧊🤗