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How to Find the Right Hunter for Your Launch on Product Hunt

Last Updated: Apr. 07, 2023 | FEATURED IN: News

Hi, everyone. 🤗

Welcome back to my blog. I’m Morgan Kung, the founder of Gemoo.

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about my experience of launching three products on Product Hunt and received a lot of feedback and support. I am very grateful for your support, which gives me the motivation to continue creating. I also hope my experience can be helpful to all of you.

In addition, I found that many of you are interested in how I found the right hunters and led over-expected launch results. For this, I am very grateful to @falak_sher and @benln for helping us publish them.

At first, I want to create and post a simple list of the Top 20 hunters, but I feel that this may not be very helpful; so I decided to write a blog post to explain why you need to find the right hunters to launch your products instead of doing it yourself, how to find suitable hunters, and how to invite them to publish your products.

Now, let’s get started. 🏹🎉

Find the Right Hunter on ProductHunt

Benefits of getting a famous hunter to launch your product.

We have to admit that we are living in an era where traffic is king, which is why we better seek a famous hunter to help us launch our product instead of doing it ourselves.

Famous hunters are usually very nice, willing to help start-up teams showcase their work to the world, have a considerable number of followers, and are true technology enthusiasts. If a famous hunter launches your product,

💬 He/she might give you valuable feedback on your project before the launch day
🔔 His/her followers the hunter will be notified about the launch
💥 It’ll provide the initial boost that your product deserves
😍 people will take time to check the product out as it’s hunted by a famous person
🏆 overall, it’ll give your product a head-start to the top

What famous hunters can not do is make people like your product and become your users or clients, so makers should always note that spotlighting what specific issues your product can solve in your description box.

Now comes the question: how to find the right hunter for your product?

There are a lot of factors to consider. Let me explain.

Find the Right Hunter 🎯

If we assume that every top hunter you contact agrees to launch, it’s not wise for a huntee without first determining if the hunter is a good fit for your product. Follow these steps to find the right hunter on Product Hunt:

Step 1. Searching for the Right Hunter 🕵️

An ideal hunter should fulfill the following 3 requirements:

A high number of followers
Several successful launches
A few launches in your category

All the above information can be found on the user’s profile page, take @kevin as an example:

Where can you actually find them? You can do it manually or take advantage of hunter-searching tools.

Manually

I’ve made a picture guide for searching for a hunter on Product Hunt manually, so I won’t go into details here, you can check actionable steps here.

Hunter searching tools

There are many hunter-searching tools on the market, but I will only introduce one that I‘ve used and think is good, which is Upvote Bell. You can easily find the profiles of Top hunters and recently most active hunters on its leaderboard, as well as their number of followers and the number of products they have posted. The best part is that you can filter by specific category.

Step 2. Make an Effective Pitch 📝

As you might already have guessed, this part is the trickiest and requires most of your time.

The famous hunters get tens of emails and DMs every day, and if your pitch is not attractive, the chances of them replying are close to zero. You need to prepare a well-prepared pitch that’s precise and gives an overall idea of what your product is all about.

You can follow the following tips to create a pitch to reach out to the Product Hunt hunters:

Explain the problem that your product aims to solve，
Show the solution your product provides.
Share your initial customers’ (such as beta testers) thoughts on the product.
Explain the motivation behind creating this product.
Introduce your team, or yourself if you are an independent developer.

Please note that keep everything as simple as possible, and show your sincerity. At last, don’t forget to ask for ideas to improve your product at the end.

Also, the following picture shows 5 common pitching mistakes you should avoid:

Step 3. Prepare a Hunter Kit 📦

When goes to pitching, it is important to provide the hunter with all the necessary information in a clear and organized format. This not only makes the posting process easier for the hunter, but also ensures that your product is represented accurately to the community.

Some hunters will send you their customized webpage, you only need to submit all the information and materials mentioned on the page.

As you can see from the above example of the product submit webpage, key information that should be included in your hunter kit are:

Basic product info, such as product name, tagline, description, URLs, square logo, etc.
High-quality media assets such as images, GIFs, and videos showcase different features of your product. Video is most recommended.
Detailed information about the availability and pricing of your product, including any promotional offers that might be available for the Product Hunt community.
Product Hunt usernames of makers and their social media handles
Your preferred launching date and time.

Provide all necessary information to the hunter for a better chance at a successful launch. The more details you provide, the better the hunter can evaluate and share the product with the community. Be comprehensive and feel free to include all the details in your hunter kit.

Step 4. Reach out 📤

Once you’ve prepared your pitch and hunter kit, it’s time to reach out to hunters. Email is usually the best way to contact them, but if you can’t find their email, Twitter DMs can work too. In some cases, hunters may have created a page like Chris Messina’s here, which makes it easier to contact them.

By the way, Chris is the 🏆#1 hunter at Product Hunt currently, he’s the hunter of well-known ChatGPT as well.

Based on my experience, it’s better to reach out to around 4 hunters at a time, which means you send messages or emails to 4 hunters at the first and don’t start to contact more before they reply to you saying no. Thus, my suggestion is to start the process 4-6 weeks before the launch.

If your pitch gets accepted by a hunter, be sure to immediately post the first comment as soon as the product goes live on the launch day. I’d also suggest having a press kit ready in case any journalist or blogger wants to feature you in their story.