How I Got Featured on Product Hunt And What Happened Next

Well, that escalated quickly.

Getting your product featured on Product Hunt is an indescribable feeling.

I was pumped with adrenaline all day, even after the 2-hour workout I did in the evening.
Wondering how I did it and what I learned? Sit tight!

The Idea

Past August, I decided it was time to start my own side project. Working for clients is fun, but you are always working on something that is not yours.

I wanted my own product. Something I could be proud of and show to people. So the thinking process started.

Great products are the ones that solve a problem. As a marketer and landing page designer, I had one big problem. There are no galleries for the best landing pages.

Landing page design inspiration is hard to find. You have got to crawl the web to find some inspiration.

I decided to solve this problem forever.

Building

Starting Friday afternoon, I decided to spend the whole weekend coding Landingfolio.

Sunday evening, it was finished. I created the platform, made a logo and added some landing page examples.

After working for a whole weekend, I was exhausted and went to bed.

The next morning, normal life started again. Being busy with lots of clients, Landingfolio started to gather dust. That, combined with the fact that I had no clue how to get traffic, made me now look at the project for two months.

This week

After working hard for the past few months, I finally finished all the projects for my clients. I woke up Monday with no work to do this month.

I finally had time to work on some personal projects again and decided to pick up Landingfolio again.

I remembered buying Justin Jackson's "Product Hunt Handbook". In this book, Justin explains what it takes to get featured on Product Hunt. You should buy this.

Taking a bold step

Jason inspired me with his podcast, Build&Launch, and the Product Hunt book. So I decided to mail Justin to ask what he thought about Landingfolio.

To my surprise, Justin mailed back.

Woh, does this mean I am going to get featured on Product Hunt?

I was expecting that, if I would get posted, I would still have two days to fix the last few things. Nope.

Landingfolio was featured on Product Hunt, wow!

Launch day

From this point, everything went so quickly. Immediately after being featured, visitors started pouring in.

I expected to get some upvotes, but so many? Within a few hours, I already got 100 upvotes.

@dannypostmaa LandingFolio was upvoted 100 times. Mom & dad would be proud pic.twitter.com/uZA1SdujoR

— Product Hunt (@ProductHunt) October 14, 2015

An hour in it hit me, I made a big mistake. I was not capturing any emails. So, within 5 minutes I registered for ActiveCampaign for just $9 and build an email opt-in form.

To gather more email, I decided to build a lead magnet; a lookbook of the 8 best landing pages reviewed.

I registered an account at OptinMonster for another $9 a month. I created a banner and set the popup live (sorry people but pop-ups just work..)

The pop-up resulted in 110 new subscribers, who received the lookbook (you can download it here)

The other 59 new subscribers came from this little fellow I implemented halfway through the day.

I got this idea from this post written by Bryan Harris, where he explains how he got 510 more leads using this method. Thanks, Bryan!

Furthermore, the on-site form resulted in 91 new subscribers.

Thanks everyone for subscribing!

The results

Landingfolio reaching a whopping #2 place on Product Hunt with 753 upvotes (and still counting)!!

Even more impressive is the number of visitors. Where Landingfolio got not more than 5 visitors a day, launch day send 3.716 visitors!

And the next day it got another 5.606 visitors.

I expected the next day to be less than the first day, but it seems that we are going to top the first day.

Four days later, this is the result. A whopping 12.000 people visited Landingfolio.

At peak time there were 86 visitors on the site at the same time. I am happy that I switched from a $5/month hosting to my own VPS.

Furthermore, I managed to gather 410 email addresses of people interested in the landing pages. I couldn't have wished a better start for my mailing list.

What might even be better than this flood of visitors, were the kind words I got via Twitter.

@dannypostmaa Landingfolio is so cool Danny :) Really interesting and helpful for our onboarding research!

— Thomas Dunn (@thomasdunnuk) October 14, 2015

@dannypostmaa Nice page Danny, you got my upvote!

— Jim Groenen (@jimgroenen) October 14, 2015

@dannypostmaa Love http://t.co/UOHxx8zMoA!

— Scott Magdalein (@ScottMagdalein) October 15, 2015

What I learned

Launch day thought me quite some things about launching your product on Product Hunt.

1. Get someone with a lot of followers to submit your product.

Submitting your own product on Product Hunt is almost impossible. You need someone to submit it for you. The best person to do this is someone with a lot of followers.

Product Hunt sends an email to all those persons followers when that person submits a product.

This means that 2.949 people received this email from Justin.

This is probably one of the reasons that Landingfolio got so high in the ranking.

2. Capture emails or leads

You won't get a second chance to get this many visitors, so make use of it! Capture email addresses or start capturing leads.

This way, after all the hype, is gone, you have got a list of people who are really interested in your product.

3. Get some good hosting, now!

Two months ago I was hosting Landingfolio at a cheap hosting provider for five bucks a month. Would I still be there, the website would be down the minute it got featured on Product Hunt.

I decided to switch hosting just to be sure if I would ever get mentioned on Product Hunt. Don't waste your one minute of fame!

What's next

So, after this hectic day, it is time to think about the future. What am I going to make of Landingfolio and what should be the business model?

I plan on posting a lot of blogs about landing page inspiration, design, and optimization.