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All right. So in the previous two scenarios we spoke about how you build up an audience of your own.
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So whether that's through building an email list or through building a following by doing content marketing
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or starting a blog, that's all well and good. But what if you need to boost your numbers or what if you
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don't have enough of those numbers?
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Well, this is where the third scenario comes in.
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And this is about piggybacking off somebody else's audience.
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Now there's three search services I really want to talk about. First and foremost and probably the most
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important if you're working in tech is Product Hunt. Producthunt.com is a web site where essentially
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you get to hunt cool things or new things that have launched.
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So very often you'll see things being hunted here being featured on Techcrunch like maybe two or three
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days later.
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It's essentially a site where a lot of discovery happens and it's cool because if you're an early adopter
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or if you're somebody who wants to be on the bleeding edge of tech, then this is where you discover all the
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cool stuff.
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So the way that it works is that when a product is hunted, it is live on the front page for 24 hours.
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And within these 24 hours, you have the opportunity of being upvoted or being discussed.
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Now the higher your upvotes, the more likely it is that you're going to gain visibility.
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And it's the visibility that's really crucial because not only does this website get tens of thousands
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of hits per day, but additionally you get hits from really relevant people within tech. So these are your
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journalists, these are your tech bloggers, these are your VCs and your angels.
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So depending on what you're going for, being hunted and discovered on Product Hunt can significantly
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boost your product launch.
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Personally this is one of my favorite websites and I've been a member very early on.
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In fact, it's probably the first thing I do when I crack over my laptop in the morning and drink my coffee.
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It's Product Hunt
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I go to to discover what cool new things are being built and really tap the pulse of our tech community.
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So I'm going to talk about a couple of things to note
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when you are going to go for launch on Product Hunt because it has some quirks that you need to be aware
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of in order to have a successful launch. As you can imagine, if there's tens of thousands of hits to this
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website there's also hundreds of product submissions every day.
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So in order for yours to appear within the crucial front page as you can see it gets cut off about here,
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there's you know maybe 22 more.
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And these are the featured products.
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So that means it's either been hunted by somebody influential or it's been noticed by the Product Hunt
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team or it's just gain a massive amount of traction.
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Now if you sign up to the website either through referral or by yourself and you try to hunt a product
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where it will end up is this tab which is the newest hunts.
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And as you can see by looking at the upvotes or the comments, this is not as readily discovered compared
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to the featured page.
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So here we've got about maybe 70 products and this is not what you see when you first go onto Product
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Hunt. And the way that most people use this website is that they'll scroll through typically just you
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know the first featured page.
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And in order to end up here there's a few things that you need to know.
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Firstly, the 24 hour cycle starts at 8:00 a.m. GMT.
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So that means if you want a full 24 hours of exposure on the front page, you're going to have to you're
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going to have to get your product hunted at 8:01am. And the person who hunts your product matters a great
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deal.
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There are super influences within Product Hunt who have the ability to boost you straight to the featured
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page and that's where you need to be because there's a whole bunch of APIs a whole bunch of newsletters
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etc. that scrape from the top post on Product Hunt.
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And also if you end up in the top five, you get distribution out to their email list in a daily sort of
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summary.
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So get in touch with people who are influential hunters and the best way is usually through Twitter.
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And you need to provide them with a number of details that they'll need.
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Now this includes the name of the product, the URL, the tagline.
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These are basically things that they're going to have to input into Product Hunt in order to hunt you.
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Now if they're a pro Hunter then they might have other things that they want from you.
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But essentially the point is just to make their lives as easy as pain free as possible
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and on top of that that you have an interesting product for them to want to hunt.
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Then you have maximum chance of success.
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So how do you know who are the super influencers?
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Well there's a website that I've linked down here which is a Product Hunt leaderboard and you can see here
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the top 200 products of all time but you can also see the top 200 hunters
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and this is updated every day or so. And that depends on the number of votes and the number things they've hunted,
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the number of followers.
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And these are people who have a lot of influence on this platform.
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Essentially the way to do it is one by one, figure out who these guys are on Product Hunt.
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Check out what they've hunted previously and try to figure out what are they interested in, what kind
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of products do they tend to hunt.
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And out of that list find maybe 20 or 30 people who you think could be interested in what you're doing
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and hit them up over Twitter.
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So Product Hunt is linked with Twitter.
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So in most cases if you just search Twitter for their handle, it will be the same person and just tweet at 
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them and see if they will be kind enough to hunt your product.
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Now the other thing about Product Hunt is that when you do get hunted and you obviously want to be upvoted
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because the more up votes the higher you go.
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Now that's not always the case because if you look for example here, these people Avocode have a
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168 upvotes.
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But these people have 169 upvotes.
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Why are they below this one?
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Well because Product Hunt actually has a sophisticated algorithm and it's getting more and more sophisticated
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day by day.
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So the thing that-- so one of the things to note is that if you go to the page for your product and you
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share this link with people, the resulting upvotes that you get won't be as strongly weighted as if
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they discovered it from the home page.
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So if from the home page I upvote Avocode here,
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this is a much stronger indicator of interest than if I came to Product Hunt through the shared link.
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The other thing that you really have to try not to do is never share the direct link on Facebook, on
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Twitter anywhere asking for votes.
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It's a part of Product Hunt community guidelines.
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They don't want people to solicit upvotes.
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Now that can be okay if you're you know already near the top and you just share the home page and tell
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people you know go upvote us,
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We are Pitchbot on the front page.
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But what if you're not there?
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What if you're on the newest list which is really hard to discover?
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Or what if you are actually below the show 22 more? what if you're somewhere down here?
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Then it can be really hard to direct your community to help you out and upvote you.
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So one of the things that you can do is so say if you are something you say Bookup right? You can actually
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search for Bookup and hit enter and share this link instead.
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Now this doesn't always work especially if your name sounds really similar to a whole bunch of other
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startups or products.
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But it can often mean the difference but it can often mean the difference of being penalized for your
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upvotes or actually having it count.
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So the big no no is sharing the link, pasting it everywhere that's public and trying to solicit votes.
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You often see products that start climbing the charts on Product Hunt home page and then suddenly crash
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because they trigger the algorithm.
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So I could probably talk about so I could probably talk about Product Hunt for days and days if not
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a week.
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And there's a lot of intricacies that you have to abide by if you want a successful launch on Product
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Hunt.
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But the important thing is that once your product gets hunted, then nobody can hunt the same link again.
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So make sure that you're properly prepared if you are going to go for a Product Hunt launch and make sure
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that you try and get an influencer on Product Hunt to help you out.
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Now what are the advantages of actually ending up on here?
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Very often through either personal experience or friends of mine who have done product launches,
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if you end up on the front page especially within the top five you can expect tens of thousands of hits
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just within 24 hours.
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And that usually translates to a couple of thousands of either downloads or buys or whatever it takes
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to acquire your product.
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So it is a huge thing.
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And also you get noticed by the right people.
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So if you're going to launch a digital product or even a physical product, as long as it fits one of
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these categories it's well worth just investigating and planning your launch on Product Hunt.