I joined Product Hunt as Head of Growth!

Every day 100s of new startups launch on Product Hunt ranging from indie hackers to VC-backed startups with millions in the bank.

The Product Hunt leaderboard is the most exciting place on the internet — the world stage for startup launches. A successful Product Hunt launch can get you new customers, investors, and momentum to kickstart your company.

Want my support on your Product Hunt launch?

Here’s 12 things that make me press upvote, comment, and support a product:

1. Does it solve a problem in a new, innovative way? Or is it another AI writing tool? For example, I saw a really cool product launch on Friday called Living Images that A/B test photos that automatically update using Gen AI. Insane. We are officially living in the future!

2. A SaaS product. Notion templates, databases, PDF, etc, are allowed but the Product Hunt community is built around SaaS. When I scan the leaderboard I’m looking for new SaaS that’ll help me 10x my work, not a Notion template I can make in 10 minutes (sorry, not sorry ❤️).

3. Clear tagline. Your tagline is the slogan that goes next to your product’s name and logo. Clear > Clever. Just say what your product does, don’t try to be cute or fancy. Your tagline is super important. It’s what makes people click to view your product. Check out this tagline masterclass from our CEO Rajiv.

4. Low-budget clear demo > high-budget vague animation. No cheesy animations and royalty-free music in your product demos that you got from Fiverr and doesn’t actually show your product at all. Unless you’re getting a big budget custom beautifully designed animation from Pixar, just do a Loom video seriously there’s no shame in it. I’d rather just see a chill demo of the product and the founder talking than some animation with cheesy music. See how our Irish goofball Aaron O’Leary did our demo for our recent Shoutouts launch (yes, Product Hunt launches products at Product Hunt too and no, we don’t always get #1 😭!)

5. “Software should be beautiful,” says the team at Notion. Take that money you were spending on an animated fancy demo and put it on delightful design. Be imaginative, be unique, say something with your design. Jam.dev is a great example with their signature weird strawberry logo and delightful designs.

6. Add a well-crafted thoughtful maker comment. A maker comment is your chance to tell your story. Why’d you make your product? What’s your background? Have you worked on cool stuff before? Why should I trust you to click on your product and press buy? Check out this one for a good example.

7. Fill out your Product Hunt profile. Whenever I see a product I check their Product Hunt profile to see if they’re legit, learn more, and go follow them on Twitter to go support them. Take the extra 3 minutes to set up your profile—it’ll be huge leverage down the line as you grow a following on the site as it’ll make it easier to launch more products. Follow me here.

8. Add in Shoutouts to products you used. Shoutouts is our newest feature at Product Hunt and it lets you shoutout 3 products you used to make your product. This is amazing high-signal data for the startup ecosystem because you can see what tools are the most trusted and what apps are built with what. If I see you put in Shoutouts, it’s a signal that you’re playing a long term game!

9. No spam DMing. If we never talked and the first thing you DM me is to check out your product hunt launch, I’ll probably ignore it. Build internet friendships for the long-term, not quick and transactional. My internet friends are some of my best friends. Build a real community; the stronger your community, the stronger your launch, no amount of spam DMs will fix that. #1 Product of the Day winner Steven Tey gives more advice on that here.

10. Don’t buy bots. We can see that shit lol. You won’t succeed.

11. Incorporate humor. I wrote a book about meme marketing and I love any product that tries to incorporate memes or silly humor. I did a breakdown on one here that got #1 of the Day using meme marketing. Another maker recently launched a product called PoopUp to send your users funny pop-ups. #Nice. Not everyone likes funny marketing but I sure do!

12. Play the right game. Last but not least, this is the most important thing. As Rajiv says, there’s 2 games you can play on Product Hunt. 1) do you try to extract as much value as possible for nothing in return? 2) do you try to give as much value as possible and hope for the best? Over-give on value and you’ll probably get value back. Under-give on value and you’ll fail. Good rule for life and internet.

BTW If you’re making something cool and need strategy help, I got something you might like…

Memes of the Week:

Let’s blow up the internet together.

Thanks for reading nerds.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Head of Growth @ Product Hunt, Author of Memes Make Millions