Title: How to win at Product Hunt

Excerpt: With Air for Teams, we achieved a hat trick: Product of the Day, Week, and Month. Here’s the strategy and tactics we used to do it.

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Written by Shane Hegde, Air’s CEO and Co-founder

Product Hunt is an incredible tool — if you know how to use it.

In an increasingly uncertain economic environment where early-stage start-ups like mine are facing unprecedented headwinds, efficiency has quickly supplanted growth-at-any-cost. How can we do more with less? Getting coverage from tech outlets is tough (and, let’s be honest, costly), so how do you generate organic buzz around what you’re building?

One key way is launching on Product Hunt — although launching is the easy part.

It’s the winning part you have to nail.

That part’s a whole lot trickier.

This is how we won.

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Why Product Hunt?

First, some backstory

My company, Air, is a Creative Operations platform for marketers and creatives. It's a visual workspace where your team’s content can be easily stored, shared, managed, and finalized. My co-founder and I met in college and started the company in 2017, launching the product in February 2020. A month later the world would stop and we would spend two years fighting tooth and nail to bring this product to life. Today, we have nearly 100k customers and are valued at over $100m. If you’d asked me six months ago, I’d have said we were perfectly positioned for a healthy Series B.

Then the money went away.

As the macroeconomic impacts of recession took root across tech and SaaS, we knew that paid ads alone weren’t going to paid ads alone weren’t going to supercharge our growth — or show people just how far we’d come.

We needed to get more efficient. One way to do this? Utilizing our biggest evangelists — our customers. We’d launched on Product Hunt 14 times prior, with product features and side projects alike, and never broke 1,000 upvotes. But that was before we’d built a dense network of customers, fans, and operator investors.