Before Magpie went live on Product Hunt, everyone told us that Product Hunt was not necessarily the best place for us, since our product is developed exclusively for the use of female users and most Product Hunters are men. Just for some context about what Magpie does — we’re a female travelers club, designed to help women easily find local friends sharing common interests, wherever they go.

The companies featured on Product Hunt are mostly started by men, and female hunters and makers are in the minority. But that did not deter us from giving it a try. Throughout the day, we watched in awe as the support came streaming in. Starting the day at the bottom, we steadily climbed to where we ended the day, solidly in the top 3 and with the highest number of upvotes and comments.

It’s never too late to vote for us, by the way, if you’d like to share us some love :-) We ended the day with over 600 upvotes as supporters continued to vote for us all over the world. We also saw very encouraging results: our sign-ups increased 20 times, and our site traffic increased 10 times. We also received a lot of press interview requests, partnership opportunities, and insightful user feedback. One fun fact: almost half of our upvotes came from women, making us probably the most upvoted product by PH women voters, woohoo!!!

We had so much fun on Product Hunt on the auspicious Mag(Pi)e day ;-) and would love to share what we learn in case helpful to other startups going to launch on Product Hunt.

Though we ended the day with the highest number of upvotes (over 500!) and comments, we still ranked second on the site. We found out that this was due to Product Hunt’s intriguing ranking methods that take in factors like organic search and how active your voters are on Product Hunt.

Our Top Advice for Going Live on Product Hunt

Getting featured takes some time.

Product Hunt members can “hunt” products, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to go live. Going live requires extra conversation with the Product Hunt team. They tend to be pretty responsive (especially over their super-useful live chat) but they also get bogged down pretty often because they all work really hard. Don’t be put off if you send them an email about being featured and don’t hear back for a few days. Ping them again, be really nice, and thank them often for their help. Because they really are amazing.

Friends and family go a long way!

On the day you go live, usually with just a few days of advance notice, you’ll need all the support you can get from your close-knit network of friends and family. After all, we don’t launch new products every day so don’t be too shy to reach out for help :P Send out emails far and wide to your personal and professional contacts and ask for upvotes and comments. Get all your personal contacts ready in advance so you can keep them posted on updates throughout the day. Use LinkedIn and Gmail export lists from your entire team to spread the net as far and wide as you can.

The moment we hit 500 upvotes, around 10:30 PM. Note that due to Product Hunt’s ranking system we are still second.

Link to Product Hunt, not your product page

You’re probably thinking that linking directly to your product page on Product Hunt would be more convenient for your personal contacts to upvote — but actually, upvotes carry more weight if they’re from organic traffic. Product Hunt demotes inorganic traffic, so make sure to ask people to search for you from producthunt.com.

Comments from frequent Product Hunt users carry a lot of weight

It’s possible to get the most upvotes, yet still not be first in the rankings on the Product Hunt homepage. At one point in the day, we were trailing people with less votes than us because they had more comments from more influential members of Product Hunt. To avoid this, it’s important to think ahead. Not everyone can comment on products — you need to have sufficient prior activity on Product Hunt to be able to leave comments. So before you go live, think of the people you know personally who are frequently active on Product Hunt and ask them to comment on your product. This will carry a lot of weight!

Give the PH community some extra love

We didn’t have time to make this happen, but if we were to do it again, we’d come up with a special promo for the PH community. In our case, it could have been getting 10 votes for every #TravelThrowback photo you share with Magpie, or a special Magpie travel set to get you ready for the next trip!

Use email capture to follow up with users

We were too excited about getting featured on PH, and honestly we didn’t expect to get 600 upvotes in one day, so we weren’t ready to have an email capture feature on our landing page. Now we have to find a way to sift through all the upvotes to follow up with our female supporters! So our advice: make sure you have that email capture ready to go on your landing page!

Use social media to support, not to spam

Throughout the day, tweet to no more than 3 people at a time. Don’t get carried away like we did in the morning. Don’t abuse tagging @producthunt or #producthunt if you’re doing mass tweets. That will look spammy, not to mention the flood that our poor friends at Product Hunt will receive.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint

One of the benefits of being an international team is that we have friends and family from all over the world. In the evening when everyone else’s activity started to taper off, our friends in Asia woke up and started voting. Late into the night, we continued to watch our upvotes and comments climb. Use your international connections to your advantage to ensure that you’ll have a continuous stream of votes that doesn’t slow to a crawl at the end of the work day. This is how we were able to surpass everyone at the end!