Product Hunt launch checklist, week by week

To launch on Product Hunt, make a personal account at least a week ahead, fill in a listing with a tagline of up to 60 characters, a description of up to 500 and at least two gallery images, and schedule it for 12:01am Pacific time with a first comment ready. Then spend launch day replying to every comment. The thing that decides the day most is whether Product Hunt’s team features your launch on its homepage, and nothing on any checklist guarantees that. Every fact about Product Hunt below was read on its own pages on 23 September 2026.

Deacon is an AI customer support agent for founders who answer support themselves. On launch day it answers the visitors who click through to your site, in seconds and from your own docs, while you’re busy in the comments. The same script shows you where they came from and whether they signed up. There’s a free plan, and it needs no card.

Your account, four weeks or more before

Product Hunt makes a new account wait a week before it can post a product, and recommends joining three months or more before you launch. Use the time to become someone the community recognises.

• Make a personal account for each maker. Company and brand accounts can’t post products or comment.
• Fill in your profile with a short description, your website and your X handle. Far more people look at it on launch day and in the weeks after than usual.
• Comment on other people’s launches and join the forums. Product Hunt lists asking your community to join only on launch day among the common mistakes.
• Ask your co-makers to make their accounts well before the day, because the listing needs their usernames to credit them.

You don’t need a hunter. Anyone can post their own product, and Product Hunt says 79% of featured posts were posted by their own makers, as were 60% of the products that finished first of the day. Paying anyone to post your product or send it traffic is against its rules and can get the product removed.

The listing, three weeks before

Start the listing as a draft. Product Hunt doesn’t index drafts, your co-makers can work on one with you, and everything you enter is saved as you go. These are the fields on its launch guide, with their limits.

Product Hunt’s help centre still gives the description 260 characters, in an article last updated on 28 May 2025. The launch guide’s 500 is the current figure.

The URL can’t carry your own tag, but Product Hunt adds one. Every link from your listing to your site ends in ?ref=producthunt, and that matters when you read your analytics later.

Images and video, two weeks before

Product Hunt shares a few figures about the launches that did best. They show what winners had, not what made them win.

• About 53% of the products that reached Product of the Day since 2021 had a video, so nearly half didn’t.
• Fewer than a third of Product of the Day products used an animated GIF as their thumbnail.
• 70% of products that reached Product of the Day, Week or Month had a first comment from their maker.

If you can’t make a polished video, Product Hunt suggests a quick demo recorded with a tool such as Loom. An interactive demo is another way to show the product working. For the gallery, lead with one image that says what the product does as a headline, then screenshots with a caption on each, so someone flicking through understands it without reading your description.

The first comment and your site, a week before

The first comment sits right below your gallery, and you write it as you submit. Product Hunt suggests it covers these.

• Who the product is for, and the use it fits best.
• Its key features.
• Your story, and why you built it.
• Any offer for Product Hunt visitors.
• A request for feedback, and never for upvotes.

It also advises plain words over marketing language, and a humble, helpful tone.

Then get your own site ready for the visitors who click through. Product Hunt suggests a landing page built around one action, which can speak to its visitors directly if you have an offer. Make sure that page answers the questions they’ll ask before signing up, which are listed further down. What to do after launching a website has the full check of your site, from analytics to signing up on a phone.

Schedule it for 12:01am Pacific

You can schedule a launch up to a month ahead. Product Hunt’s day runs on Pacific time, so a launch at 12:01am Pacific gets the full 24 hours on the homepage. That’s 08:01 in London for most of the year.

Product Hunt says there’s no golden-ticket day. Much launch advice picks a Tuesday or a Wednesday, but the one figure Product Hunt gives points the other way for small teams. Products launched at a weekend get 15% more clicks on their Visit button than those launched on weekdays, and it says weekends can be great for smaller teams, side projects and personal apps.

What Product Hunt allows on launch day

Your two jobs on the day, in Product Hunt’s words, are getting the word out and replying to comments as close to real time as you can. Its rules for the first are short.

• Share your launch link anywhere you like, and ask people to visit and comment.
• Don’t ask for upvotes. Asking or rewarding people for them can drop your launch down the rankings or take it off the homepage.
• Don’t run a contest that rewards upvotes, and don’t send the same message to hundreds of people.
• Every upvote counts the same, a maker’s included.

Claim your Product Page on the day with “Claim this page”, because everyone who upvotes your launch becomes a follower of that page. The Launch Day dashboard tracks your position, upvotes, comments and reviews as the day goes on.

Why being featured matters more than the rank

The homepage shows featured launches unless a visitor switches to All, and Product Hunt’s team chooses them, with votes only part of what it weighs. It looks for launches that are useful, novel, well crafted or creative, and says a featured launch often stands out on only one or two of the four. It doesn’t feature waitlists, templates, directories, services, stores or “minimal, undifferentiated products that seem primarily focused on immediate monetization”. In the vast majority of cases, its decision is final.

The difference shows in FlowBot, a WhatsApp and website chatbot. Featured on 5 November 2025, it finished its launch day on 131 upvotes. Its makers launched it again on 4 January 2026, and without being featured it finished on 7.

A good finish keeps paying the next day. Product Hunt’s Daily Digest email reaches more than 350,000 readers every weekday with the previous day’s top 10 most upvoted products. You can also keep promoting your launch page for two weeks after launch day, and Product of the Week and Month are still to play for.

If you’re not featured, Product Hunt says it isn’t a judgement on your product’s quality, and you can resubmit after six months.

What the link on your listing is worth

Some founders launch for the backlink. The link from a listing to your site carries rel="noreferrer noopener ugc", and Google says links marked ugc will generally not be followed. We also opened the 17 launches Product Hunt featured on 22 September the next day, and 11 of their pages told search engines not to index them at all. Launch for the feedback and the first users, not the link.

The questions launch-day visitors ask

Product Hunt describes its community as makers, early adopters, tech people, entrepreneurs and investors. Many will have seen a similar product that week, so their questions are pointed, and they ask them on your site as well as in your comments. Expect these.

• How is it different from the product they already use?
• Is there a free plan, and what happens when the trial ends?
• Does it work with the tools they already use?
• What happens to their data?
• Is there a launch deal, and how long does it last?

Answer each one on your site before the day, on your pricing page, in your FAQ or on a help page, so a visitor finds the answer without waiting for you. While you’re replying in the comments, a chat on your site can give those answers in seconds, as long as it answers only from what you wrote and says when it doesn’t know.

Where launch-day visitors came from

Every link from your listing to your site ends in ?ref=producthunt, including the one behind the Visit button. The links on a listing are also marked noreferrer, so the browser doesn’t pass on the page the visitor came from, and the tag is what marks the visit as one from Product Hunt. An analytics tool that reads ref lists those visitors as producthunt. One that ignores it can file them under Direct, mixed in with everyone who typed your address. Check which yours does before the day, and if you’re choosing one, Google Analytics alternatives compares their free plans.

Three more things help when you read the numbers.

• Judge each source by sign-ups, not by visits or upvotes. Tag your sign-up button as a goal and compare the share of each source’s visitors who signed up.
• Product Hunt’s day runs midnight to midnight Pacific time. If your analytics counts days in UTC, as Deacon’s does, launch day is split across two days of your chart, at 5pm Pacific in summer and 4pm in winter.
• Tag any link to your own site that you post yourself, such as in a newsletter, with a utm_source, so those visitors show under their own name rather than in Direct.

For the week after, what to do after launching a website covers the numbers worth watching and the questions to keep a tally of, and customer insights what those questions tell you.

How Deacon helps on launch day

Deacon answers your launch-day visitors while you answer the comments, and shows you afterwards who came, from where and what they asked.

Before the day, give it your pricing page, your docs and your FAQ. Add the questions from the list above with Add Q&A, and each written answer is ready to use as soon as it’s been read. Ask Deacon your visitors’ questions in the Playground, where chats are never counted against your plan. Add data-deacon-goal="Sign up" to your sign-up button, and the same script counts sign-ups by source.

Check your plan too. The free plan’s 50 answers come to about 25 conversations, which a busy launch can use up. The owners on your team get an email when 80% of the month’s answers have gone and again when they all have. After that, visitors get a short reply saying Deacon can’t look into it right now, and are asked for their email unless they’ve already left it in that conversation. Nothing is billed past your plan and no plan upgrades itself, so if you expect a crowd, move to Starter before the day. It’s $50 a month, or $40 a month billed yearly, for 1,000 answers a month, about 500 conversations.

On the day, Deacon answers in seconds, in the language each visitor writes in, which matters on a site with visitors from everywhere. When your content doesn’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know instead of guessing, and asks for the visitor’s email. When someone leaves their address or asks for a person, the owners get an email three minutes later, unless someone on the team has opened the conversation or has the dashboard open. Reply from the dashboard, and if they still have the chat open, your reply appears there under your first name and your company’s.

Analytics › Website shows the source as producthunt, the tag Product Hunt adds to its links, and not as a “Product Hunt” label, because Deacon shows every source as its raw tag or host with no grouping. Mark your sign-up button, and every source is rated by the share of its visitors who signed up. Worth knowing, under the chart, notices a day with more than three times your usual day’s visitors and more than 50 of them, and names the source that sent most (unless that’s Direct, when it gives the day’s total instead), in a line such as “producthunt sent 412 people on 15 to 16 Sept.” With a Sign up goal, it adds the share of those days’ visitors who signed up against the share on other days. It also names a new JavaScript error once ten people have hit it.

After the day, Topics group the questions launch visitors asked about your product, count the people behind each one and label most of them as a feature ask, a how-to, a pricing question and so on, so you see which asks came up again and again. Every question your docs didn’t cover has an Answer this button. Write the answer once and it becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks, and the more you answer, the less it needs you.

Questions about launching on Product Hunt

How much does it cost to launch on Product Hunt?

Nothing. Product Hunt is free to use, and you can reach Product of the Day without spending anything. It sells advertising too, which is kept separate from the leaderboard and its rankings.

How often can you launch on Product Hunt?

As often as you have a significant new version. If you submit again within six months of your last launch, Product Hunt asks whether it’s a major update, and you can ask its team to approve the relaunch.

Do I need a hunter to launch on Product Hunt?

No. Hunting is just posting, and Product Hunt encourages makers to post their own products. It says 79% of featured posts were posted by their own makers.

What time should I launch on Product Hunt?

12:01am Pacific time, which gives your launch the full 24-hour day on the homepage. That’s 08:01 in London for most of the year. Product Hunt suggests a different time when something else sets it, such as press coverage due out at a given hour, or a team that won’t be online until later.

What happens if my launch isn’t featured?

It still goes live, but the homepage shows it only to visitors who switch to All, so far fewer people see it, as FlowBot’s 7 upvotes show. You can keep talking to the people who find it in your product’s forum, and resubmit after six months.

Does Deacon show Product Hunt as a source?

Yes, as producthunt, the tag Product Hunt adds to its links. Deacon doesn’t group or rename sources, so you won’t see a “Product Hunt” label. If you set your own utm_source on a link, Deacon reads that before ref.

Can Deacon reply to comments on Product Hunt?

No. Deacon answers in the chat on your own site. The replies on your Product Hunt listing are yours to write.