How to Win #1 Product of the Week on Product Hunt

In June, we launched Bond on Product Hunt. By the end of launch day we had over 800 upvotes, never dropped below #1, and went on to win Product of the Week. Check out our launch page here.

This is the entire playbook. No generic AI slop advice. A real guide with the stuff that worked, every mistake that flopped, and the accidental fleet of bots we sent to our page.

Copy shamelessly. We would.

How Product Hunt actually works

The internet loves to overcomplicate the platform, so we're simplifying it down. There are three characters in the story: the hunter, the maker, and the upvoters.

The hunter is the account that officially posts your product — the launch goes live under their name, at 12:01am Pacific, which is when every new Product Hunt day begins. A respected hunter is a credibility signal to the community and to everyone who checks "hunted by" before deciding whether you're worth a click. You can also hunt your own product, and plenty of great launches do. Here's a list of the top hunters of all time.

The makers are you: the team, officially badged on the launch. Maker status isn't decorative. Your first maker comment is your opening argument (why you built this, for whom, what's different), and the community reads maker activity in the comments as a live signal of whether real, responsive humans are behind the product. Don't forget: every maker should get themselves verified (simple process on the website that takes minutes) before launch day.

The upvoters are everyone else, and here's where launches are won or lost. Two facts first-timers learn the hard way:

1. Not all upvotes count. Product Hunt weights votes by account credibility: age, verification, real activity. An upvote from an account created yesterday is worth approximately one thought and one prayer. This is the entire reason Week 1 of our playbook exists (see below)

2. Sketchy votes can hurt you. A burst of votes from unverified, inactive, or botty accounts doesn't just round to zero, it can actively drag your ranking down.

The Timeline

Week 1: Warm up accounts

The highest-leverage, least-glamorous thing we did. A month before launch, we activated ~200 people from our personal networks. Every one of them created (or resurrected) a Product Hunt account a full month early, got verified, and stayed lightly active (scrolling, upvoting, existing on the platform) so that by launch day, they counted as real humans.

Within your team, verification is non-negotiable. It takes minutes. Do it today, actually—this article will still be here when you get back.

Remember: these aren't ALL the people within your networks—just the ones who you are certain will follow through on actually staying active on the platform daily. Split between a team of 6, we all accumulated a list of around 30 each.

Week 2: Create assets

Gallery images, tagline, first maker comment, demo video: the works (full steal-able checklist below). Our rule now, tattooed on our hearts: everything done seven days before launch.

Did we follow this rule ourselves? We did not. We finished our slides and demo Loom at hours we're not proud of, so please PLEASE learn from our sleep deprivation: procrastination is never worth it.

Asset list:

• On the page:

  • Tagline (60 characters max)

  • Description

  • A first maker comment that tells your story authentically

  • 5–8 gallery images, and the first one is doing 80% of the lifting

  • Demo video, ideally under 2 minutes. Can be a loom, can be graphics-heavy, just has to be no-BS. Ours is here

  • Every teammate linked as a maker

  • Maker shoutouts/"built with" list: the tools you used, and a short description of how

• Behind the scenes:

  • Pre-written comment answers

  • The "we're live" text for your network

  • Pre-drafted social post announcements for each teammate

  • Prep your hunter

  • Optional: a tracker for who actually upvoted so you can thank them (highly recommend)

Week 3: Line up your people

Assign comment owners in advance. If you play your cards right, you'll get a decent amount of comments flooding in at once. It's important to know who takes what. Our engineers answered the technical questions, and growth took the rest. We created a specific slack channel to track comments that fell through the cracks, and take questions if we felt compelled to answer.

Optional: pre-write answers to the 5–10 questions you already know are coming ("how is this different from X?", pricing, privacy). Just to smoothen things out on launch day.

Lastly, week 3 is when you tell your 200 the exact date and what you'll need. On launch day itself your message can just be "WE'RE LIVE" and a link. We've seen startups use Partiful, Luma, or even one big group chat. Personally, we ended up sending individual notifications via Whatsapp or iMessage which, although less convenient, seemed to optimize for more engagement.

Week 4: GO HAM!

Launch week.

The Bond team took advantage of our San Francisco location and spend the day at Corgi cafe slowly picking up votes while also contacting every single person in our networks (Chloe even got banned from Whatsapp for a day).

Here's a cadence for launch day:

• 12:01am PT: you're live. Hunter posts, your first maker comment goes up within minutes. Think of it like an opening argument.

• 12:05am: first wave. Ping your night owls and your other-timezone people. Europe is awake and Europe has thumbs. Thanks to our Belgian engineers, we were able to mobilize over 200 before 4am.

• 4am PT: rankings go live.

• Morning: the big wave. The "WE'RE LIVE" text to your full list, personal messages flowing, each teammate's pre-drafted socials going out on their own accounts. A steady stream of credible votes all day beats one giant morning spike that flatlines by noon.

• All day: comment ops. Answer everything. Engineers on technical threads, founders on vision and pricing, pre-written answers doing the heavy lifting. An active comment section is itself a ranking signal!

• All day: milestone content. "We just passed 500" and "50 votes from #1" posts give people who already support you a reason to share again. You get multiple bites at everyone's feed on launch day; use them!

• Evening: last push! West coast is off work and Asia is waking up. This is when you message the people you were saving, and when close races flip.

ADHD? Here's the 4-day crunch version

No month? Relatable. We got your back too:

• Day 1: Verify every team account. Personally text everyone you know. Get a hunter.

• Day 2: All assets. Gallery, tagline, first comment, demo. The video will take longer than you think, so prioritize that first.

• Day 3: Comment owners assigned. Answers pre-written. Social posts prepped.

• Day 4: Launch. Ham.

You lose the account-warming month, which sucks, but can be made up for if you stay organized and on top of outreach.

The real tea: here's where we f*cked up

1. We didn't optimize for conversions.

   1. We didn't include a promo code or have a plan for how we were going to convert upvoters/commenters, especially because our ticket price is comparatively higher than most other products being launched for free.

2. The group chats…

   1. Ah yes. You will find Slack and WhatsApp communities promising upvote exchanges, and they will feel like a cheat code. Here's what we can tell you for certain: we tried them, and they moved nothing. Here's the rumor we now believe: they're substantially bots—accounts that exist only to trade votes, which is exactly the kind of unverified, low-credibility activity Product Hunt's ranking discounts (and, word on the street, penalizes). We can't peek inside PH's algorithm to prove it, but if this rumor blows up, it started here!

3. Bonus: not a f*ck up, but a rumor we were worried about: leading people directly to your Product Hunt page (as opposed to sending them to the general Product Hunt website and having them find you on the leaderboard) will not mess anything up. You're fine to link it straight.

How I actually ran this thing (yes, on Bond)

Breaking the fourth wall a bit here, but hi. I'm Teagan, founding growth at Bond, and I know how it looks when a company says "and then we used our own product." But I was one person running a four-week campaign with hundreds of people to wrangle, a hundred assets and deadlines, and a team that all had day jobs building the actual product. So yes, I ran the launch out of Bond, and it's the only reason a serial last-minute person pulled off a (mostly) week-before launch.

What that looked like in practice:

• The whole playbook lived in Bond as one list. Every task you've read in this article: account verifications, asset deadlines, hunter confirmations, etc., went in at the start of Week 1, and Bond kept it prioritized by what actually needed to happen next. I never had to reconstruct "wait, what was I supposed to do today" from memory, which is literally my default state.

• The follow-ups chased themselves. Activating 200 people really means asking, waiting, and nudging 200 separate times. Bond surfaced who hadn't confirmed, who'd gone quiet, and who I'd promised things to. It pulled out of my Notion, Slack, and emails-I-forwarded-to-myself so I didn't have to bounce between platforms trying to figure out what I sent to who.

• The deadlines fought back. When the demo Loom slipped (it was me, I slipped it), Bond continued to surface it as highest priority until I couldn't take it anymore and realized it needed to be done. When scripting the Loom, I used Bond to pull from old Slack messages to look for unique use-cases to point out.

Thanks for reading!!

Launching soon? Steal the playbook, skip the group chats, and if you want the to-do list to run itself while you go ham, try Bond. It's already running our next launch.

Try Bond →