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The Marketing Millennials
Go-to-Market Plays #6: A Launch Channel That Most Marketers Totally Overlook
00:15:58
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- [00:02]
A
What is up marketing besties? We are kicking off a brand new mini series called Go to Marketplace where we break down one go to market move in under 10 minutes. Real tactics, zero fluff, just the kind of stuff you actually use to launch smarter, grow faster and win your market. And joining me for this whole series is someone who lives and breathes Go to Market, Tamara Graminski. She's an award winning product marketer, former VP of product marketing at Kajabi, and one of the sharpest minds in the game. Let's get into it. We are back with another Go to market play in 10 minutes or less. And today's episode is about a launch channel that most marketers totally overlook. I overlook this channel. I sometimes forget about this channel, but it actually is a powerful channel and if you use it in the right way, it, it could give you major visibility, very qualified traffic, and also will build brand credibility early and back with me is the Tamara Gominski, founder of PMEMcamp and the ex VP of Product Marketing at Kajabi and Unbound. And Tamara is here to really give the insider view of this secret channel. So what's up, Tamara?
- [01:27]
B
Hey, thanks for having me back today. I'm excited to kind of spill the beans on this secret channel, which is Product Hunt. I've led dozens of launches as a product marketer and I see time and time and time again most marketers and I'm sure, like, you've even been guilty of this. I've been guilty of it. We default to like the same channels, right? We're like, let's do some emails to customers and leads, let's post some social content and let's do a blog post. But Product Hunt is a massive opportunity because it's free distribution. Right. And it's massively underused by most people outside of like the indie circles. And so it's still, you know, easy to get ahead. I would say. I've actually used this channel myself for several launches in my career and I'm going to talk about one of them today as we go through it.
- [02:17]
A
Yeah. And I think the best teams out there look at every distribution channel as a channel and I think Product Hunt is a real channel. And I mean with the name Product Hunt, it helps you hunt for products. So obviously it's a qualified channel that you need to consider in your product launches. But with the right prep, the right positioning and a whole post launch strategy, Tamara will help break this down because I asked her to break this down because I haven't done this channel before and I'M not afraid to admit that.
- [02:51]
B
Yeah. So what I love about Product Hunt is that it's not like social. It's not like you just post a social post and kind of it goes out and the algorithm will tell you what's up. It is actually a real channel and you can use it, as you mentioned at the beginning, Daniel, for awareness, for leads. And I love using it for early feedback. Right. There's a real feedback loop mechanism built in. But as you mentioned, because a lot of product or marketers and product marketers don't use Product Hunt, I still think a lot of people don't really even understand what it is or what it's capable of. So I want to just level set first. Product Hunt started as this like mashup of like Reddit meets show and tell. And it originally was for like indie makers. So a very specific scene, much more technical than the average marketer at the time. You would post your product, people would comment and if the community liked it, you'd get more and more upvotes and you'd climb the ranks. But over time it's really evolved. Now pretty much everyone uses it. So startups, VC backed companies, creators use it a lot. And I've even seen a lot of enterprise tools and it's really used to launch new products, to test positioning before maybe bringing it onto your own homepage or into your other marketing campaigns and drive real traffic.
- [04:08]
A
Yeah, and I mean, I always get a bunch of people in my DMs trying to get me to upvote their products. I know that's part of. You could probably talk about. It's probably part of their strategy is to get people that are qualified in the audience to go upvoted on Product Hunt. But I know the homepage still matters and if you land in the top five or get Product of the Day, it's like hitting a viral post on social media. It's like the jackpot of Product Hunt.
- [04:40]
B
That's exactly it. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about the upvote thing in just a second. But basically what you want is you want to hit that top five. Ideally you want top one, but top five at a minimum because it's going to give you a massive visibility bump. What will happen is if you hit top five, you'll get featured in Product Hunt's daily and weekly emails for that week, which go out to like dozens of thousands of people. And so this is really what gets you that exposure. And then we talked a little bit about credibility earlier on, um, I'm sure you've seen this before, people who go in the top five, you actually get a little badge that you can then include. So it's on your Product Hunt page, but you can also embed that badge on your website and you probably aren't even noticing it. But you, if you go back to a lot of the websites of products that you love today, you'll see that badge there. And so getting a successful launch really can help you build that credibility, especially if you're like an earlier stage product. And, you know, really it's not as simple as it sounds. And so today I want to give you two examples. One from a company that has kind of used it as a growth engine to do multiple launches, and then one launch from my own Playbook. And we'll discuss both examples and then we'll help, you know, everyone who's listening today figure out how they can kind of run a successful Product Hunt launch as well.
- [05:57]
A
And you actually kind of took the question out of my mouth of like, I've seen companies use it as a way to launch like multiple products in their. It's not only for earlier stage. And that's what I wanted to ask you. But I want. Let's go dive into the two examples that you have.
- [06:16]
B
Okay. And both examples actually are a little bit later along, so it'll be perfect. So first example is Tally. I don't know if you've heard of Tally or used it, Daniel, but it's a no code form builder that could not sound any more boring. But it's actually a really cool product. I use Tally for all of my forums and surveys. And as I mentioned earlier, they've actually launched on Product Hunt multiple times. So they launched early stages for their first release, but they continue to launch new features and even new product tiers. So last year they actually launched this like notion style dashboard update and they did it on Product Hunt and then they wrote an entire blog post breaking down their Product Hunt playbook and what made it successful. Highly recommend people go and read that if they're interested. But here's what stood out to me from the blog post. They really preceded the launch through their email list, their Twitter discord and other communities. They created really strong visuals that would make people kind of like stop the scroll. We know how important that is. And then on the day of launch, they showed up massive in the comments. They were answering questions, they were thanking supporters and they were like really building that rapport with early supporters. And this led to them becoming number one Product of the day, number one product of the week and number four, product of the month, which is pretty unheard of.
- [07:38]
A
Yeah, I think with all distribution channels, I think one thing that's often mistaken with distribution channels is that you just post something and then there's nothing to do afterwards. But this, it seems like they did. The strategy, even what people should do in content marketing, any type of marketing, is if you're gonna. Half the battle is getting a good page, a good post up there, a good, good landing page up there. The other battle is marketing it. And I think that's the missing piece. A lot of people forget is that campaigning, the marketing part of it.
- [08:14]
B
Totally. And they actually talked about that in the blog post as well. That they use that as like the starting, kind of goes back to the Rolling Thunder thing that we talked about. And so they use it as the starting point and then they continuously used it to drive further marketing after and they were continuously getting traffic. So in that blog post they actually show screen grabs of real analytics results. And they said that the launch gave them a 91% bump in signups, which is actually very impressive for a free channel. And I honestly, I don't think those results are an anomaly. Like as I mentioned, I've used Product Hunt multiple times. So I want to share an example that I worked on personally when I was at Kajabi. We launched something called the AI Creator Hub, which was a collection of tools and templates to help creators start using AI. And what we wanted to do with the AI Creator Hub is we actually wanted to reach customers outside of our regular customer base, so more early stage creators. And we thought that Product Hunt would be a good discovery channel for that specific audience. So what we did was we focused a lot of effort on crafting like a simple benefit driven tagline that would really resonate with that early stage creator. And then we used the first comment slot on Product Hunt, which might sound vague to most people, but as you're building out your Product Hunt campaign, the first comment is very important. We use that almost like a launch announcement. So instead of just being like a comment, it was a launch announcement that was well crafted. We spent a couple days crafting that and then we basically took all of the traffic and comments and engagement we were getting on Product Hunt and we drove traffic directly to the hub where people could sign up. This actually ended up being like our top six high performing website page, which was amazing. And I honestly attribute a lot of that traffic and success to our Product Hunt launch. We got tons of High intent traffic, people signed up. But what was really cool is like we could actually see that people were resonating with our narrative and they were giving comments, comments, they were asking questions. And that gave us a ton of feedback that we then used to craft our customer marketing material. And we did get top five product of the day, which was really exciting. And so we used that badge, all of the feedback and comments. We got to craft the whole campaign that we then followed up with our existing customers. So it kind of gave us content to market to others.
- [10:33]
A
First of all, congrats. Top five is a hard to get on Product Hunt. And I also know that with any channel that you're doing, you have to have a marketing strategy for the channel. It can't just be an, oh, we're going to launch a product and it's a nice to have if you're going to go do it all out. And then the second thing that I'm getting from this is it also helps you test early product messaging fit as well. So that's a good thing to do ahead of time instead of just like launching in the world without early feedback like you did with Kajabi.
- [11:12]
B
Totally. But this isn't all about me, so I want to make sure everyone on the call can also run a Product Hunt campaign successfully. So let's wrap up by sharing three moves that our listeners can steal. The first one is that you're going to want to line up your hunter and precede the audience. And I'll start with the concept of the hunter. You don't need a hunter who's well known. This is basically someone who like introduces the product. But if you can find a hunter who does have good reach within the community and has a good rating, that might help to give you an early boost. So, up to you, but worth considering your hunter strategy. But what is required is you really need to seed your audience before that launch day and Product Hunt. So let your community know what's coming, let customers know what's coming and that they can support you there. I like to DM folks and what you don't want to do is you don't want to send the exact link because if people click through the link, you kind of get penalized. But you want to say, head to Product Hunt on launch day, search for my product and engage. Right. The key thing though, and we talked about this a little earlier, is you want to make sure that these people are active users, not new signups. Which takes me to my second point, which is you want to activate Those early upvotes and comments. So here's the thing that most people get wrong, especially if they've never done a Product Hunt launch before. They kind of think that like all upvotes are treated equally, but they're not. So Product Hunt will actually weigh the value of your engagement based on like how engaged you've been in the past. So for me, I've been on Product Hunt for years. If I went and upvoted something, it would give it a good rating. Daniel, if you went and upvoted something and maybe you don't even have a Product Hunt account, you might actually hurt their campaign. And so typically you want people to be engaged for a couple weeks, if not longer, ahead of time. So if you know you have a campaign coming down the road, get employees, get customers, get folks to engage ahead of time, then on launch day, you want them to actually engage in a meaningful way. Not just click upvote. You want them to leave real comments, give real feedback. And then your team needs to be engaging as well in that conversation. And then I think you've kind of hinted at the third one, which is you still need to nail your launch assets. Like there's certain criteria that works really well on Product Hunt. There are certain, like size dimensions that you need to do. This isn't just about slapping like a post last minute. So think of your Product Hunt page as a landing page. You need a thumbnail that's going to be eye catching. That tagline needs to be strong and value based. And then as I mentioned earlier, that first comment needs to tell a story. Think of it as like your product launch pitch. So you really want to make it count.
- [13:54]
A
What I got from this in the simplest forms is 1 under first, understand the rules of the channel. I think a lot of people make this mistake with all channels, like understand the game before you play the game. So that's number one. Two, once you understand the game, understand how, what format, what content, how it gets distributed on the platform. Like you said, some things count as negative, some things count as positive. So know that if you're just going to get a bunch of your friends to go upvoted, it could actually hurt you. Versus same as algorithms and social. If you, if you get people not on your audience or you play the pod game too much, you, your post could get downvoted. It won't get seen in the algorithm. And third is just like create great content, which I think, and create great content with a hook, good imagery, good creative. I think that's how you nail this campaign, but these minute details are going to help someone nail this product HUD launch. So thank you for coming on and sharing this channel that I think I sleep on. A lot of marketers sleep on, but it's such a good way to launch a new product, a new future, even from early stage to even Kajabi, which is was a pretty big company when you were there as well. So thank you for coming on and sharing that.
- [15:20]
B
No problem.
- [15:23]
A
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.