How to actually win product of the day on Product Hunt, although you probably shouldn't: people ask me this constantly since we launched @creem_io in product hunt several times, and got product of the day twice and fintech product of the month, how'd you do it, what's the trick. i'll give you everything i know, it's all below and it's real. but first the annoying part: you probably shouldn't be pouring your energy into this at all product hunt isn't what it was 3 or 4 years ago. the traffic that used to come with a top spot has thinned out a lot. realistically you win a badge, some backlinks, a spike of signups that mostly churn, and a good day for team morale. that's it. if you're a small team spending weeks building your whole launch around winning product hunt, i think you're aiming at the wrong target. But specially, if your target audience for your product is not builders, or if you are not building a VC backable startup, I don't see many reasons to actually do it. if you actually want launch traffic, look at @UneedLists too. it's a genuinely good channel now and still a bit of a hidden secret because product hunt is just the default everyone defaults to. do both, or do UNeed and skip product hunt, depends where your users are. ok. if you still really want product of the day, here's how it really works. Get a good hunter this is the part nobody explains. for the first few hours of each product hunt day, launches don't show upvote counts and the order is basically random. the only things at the top in that window are the featured products, and featured is picked by the product hunt team, not by votes. a good hunter hugely raises your odds of getting into that featured set (around 20 a day). without one, getting up there is close to impossible. Those first few hours decide everything if you're not featured, you're basically done. nobody scrolls through 100+ products a day. people read the names of maybe the first 5 and leave. if you're not near the top early, you're invisible, and invisible doesn't win. that's why the opening hours matter more than the entire rest of the day. Treat the comment section like the actual game product hunt doesn't just count upvotes, it looks at how much real conversation is happening on your page and how meaningful it is. so don't treat comments as a formality. reply to every single one, get actual back and forth going, pull people back to keep talking. the engagement itself moves you up. Have someone glued to it all day a comment lands, you want to be replying almost immediately. answer too late and that person's gone and won't come back. you need the conversation to never go cold, which means someone is always watching, the entire launch. Be loud, but don't ask for the vote you can't ask people to upvote, that's against the rules and it can burn you. but you can and absolutely should be shouting everywhere all day that you're live and people should come check you out. there's a real line between those two. stay on the right side of it and use it fully. Never buy upvotes. ever. launch day you'll get flooded with people selling them. doesn't matter your position, doesn't matter if you think you already lost. buy and you get your product and account banned. not worth it, not once, not even a little. The real hack: run a hackathon here's the thing none of the tactics above fix on their own. a product hunt day needs a team that can stay switched on, in the comments, loud, for 24+ hours straight. most teams can't, because they're tired and scattered and treating the launch as one more thing on top of a normal week. the way we solved that also happens to be the best team alignment trick i know, and it has nothing to do with product hunt. we took the whole team to a house in tuscany for a week and ran it as a hackathon. and that word is the whole hack. "hackathon" gives the week one job. we set one goal (ship creem 2.0) and put literally nothing else on the calendar. it became the most productive week in creem's history, we beat our record for PRs shipped, design changes, nearly every metric we track. because the thing that kills a team's focus was never the work, it's the fragmentation, the meetings, the context switching, the ten little things pulling at everyone all day. put the whole team in one house with one goal and all of it disappears at once. and don't skip the fun, it's not separate from the work, it's what powers it. we had a pool, did a pasta workshop, wandered into the town nearby one night and caught a street orchestra outside a church, then went back and threw our own rave with a projector on the wall. that's the stuff that makes people actually want to be at the table at 2am. that's what carried the launch. we set up shifts so at least 3 people were awake the whole day after going live, everyone had the same goal and was loud about the launch, we all chimed in with our own social media, it was insane. if you think i'm wrong about product hunt being past its prime, tell me

I've took some time yesterday to write a bit about our vision, and what is our thinking about where the world is going in the next 5 years.