Launching Show Business: How and Why to Use Product Hunt for Brand Content

Looking to spread the word about your brand’s new show in more places? While email, social media, and paid media are great places to start, we’ve got another tactic up our sleeves. Product Hunt, the website for sharing and discovering new products, is an often overlooked but prime place to promote your show.

What is Product Hunt, and why is it beneficial for your business to launch a show there? In this post, we’ll break everything down and walk you through how to successfully launch your brand show on Product Hunt!

What is Product Hunt?

Product Hunt is a place where creators and marketers can introduce their products to a tech-loving audience and receive votes, reviews, and feedback in return. It’s similar to Reddit in that you can also comment on a product post and upvote comments.

In the early stages of your product (or show), Product Hunt is an excellent place to gauge the engagement of a community of tech-lovers.

At Wistia, we’ve used Product Hunt to launch new product features like Soapbox, Channels, and Turnstile. The launches helped raise awareness around our launches and created buzz about new features.

If a product gets enough upvotes, it might even make Product Hunt’s daily newsletter, a roundup of the day’s most popular products. This is a huge win for folks that make the cut!

Why launch a show on Product Hunt?

So, why launch your content on Product Hunt? Well, the website isn’t exclusive to posting software and snazzy features. If your content appeals to a tech-savvy audience, we think it’s worth the extra effort to post your brand’s show on Product Hunt because you can potentially reach a highly relevant and enthusiastic new audience.

For example, 360Learning, a cloud-based learning management system, launched both seasons one and season two of their show Onboarding Joei to Product Hunt. The B2B reality television series followed Joei Chan, a new hire at the company, as she learned the ropes of her new role as 360Learning’s Director of Content.

“Product Hunt is an awesome platform to discover exciting projects happening in the tech world and has long evolved beyond strict ’product' launches. I’ve had success with launching big content initiatives (interactive content like free tools or micro-sites) on Product Hunt in the past so when we created our Onboarding Joei docuseries I thought ’why not?' We’re doing a reality TV show of onboarding in a tech startup, something the majority of Product Hunt users would relate to and be interested in watching. So we launched both season 1 and season 2 of Onboarding Joei on Product Hunt.”

Joei Chan
Director of Content, 360Learning

As a B2B software company, 360Learning saw an opportunity to reach Product Hunt’s audience of tech-lovers, makers, and marketers with their engaging new series that was first of its kind.

The brand received 490 upvotes and 135 comments on their season one post of the series; Season two received 233 upvotes and 92 comments. And, the second season even made it to Product Hunt’s Daily Digest — a huge win for the brand!

“The goal of a Product Hunt launch is of course to get to Top 5 Product of the day, and be featured in their daily newsletter sent to 100K plus subscribers. In our case, we had a lot of competition on launch day (for both seasons) and did not make it to Top 5, BUT we ended up getting featured blurb on the daily newsletter anyway by the PH team (completely unexpected and 100% not sponsored) - which was 100 times better than making to Top 5. Other than driving us an insane amount of referral traffic, that made us feel really special and was a real highlight of my career.”

Joei Chan
Director of Content, 360Learning

Launching “Show Business”

At Wistia, we’ve been so inspired by 360Learning (and other brands launching content) that we’ve decided to test the waters ourselves. So, as of today (Wednesday, September 15th, 2021) — Show Business is officially live on Product Hunt!

Show Business is a 20-episode educational video series all about how to create and launch a brand show. We think the content is a great fit for Product Hunt’s audience and are excited to get feedback from the community. Plus, we want to test Product Hunt as part of our strategy to better understand its effectiveness as a marketing channel for Wistia in the future.

In true Wistia fashion, we’ll be following this blog up with a full rundown of how our launch goes and what other marketers can learn from our experience.

How to launch a show on Product Hunt

Now that you’re familiar with Product Hunt and why it could be a great place to launch your brand’s content, let’s talk logistics. Here’s a complete walk-through of how to get your show featured on the website as well as best practices and tips for a great post!

There are some essential items you’ll need to include in your post:

• Link to your show: Provide a direct link to wherever your show is hosted! We think hosting your show on your own website is the best way to impress your audience with your brand and build an owned audience.
• Your show’s name: What’s your show called? Make it known!
• Tagline: Include a very short description of what your show is all about and what folks can expect.
• Topics: Product Hunt lets you select a topic(s) related to your product for folks to find it while browsing under specific categories.
• Thumbnail: Use an image with square dimensions. Product Hunt recommends 240x240. If you want to use a GIF for your thumbnail, it will need to be under 3MB. GIFs with strobing effects, quick cuts, unreadable text, etc. are not recommended and may be edited by the Product Hunt team.
• Upload images to a gallery: Grab stills from your series and upload them to a gallery section in your post. The recommended size for images in the gallery is 1270x760. The gallery will need 2+ images before it’s viewable.
• Upload a trailer: Only YouTube links are supported by Product Hunt. So, upload your series trailer to YouTube ahead of your launch for it to show up in your gallery.
• Show description: Provide more information about what your show is about within 260 characters.
• Give credit to creators: You can select the option to include yourself as a “Maker” during the posting process. Then, add everyone to the post who’s a Maker by their Product Hunt username so they can join the conversation!
• Your brand’s Twitter account: Link to your show’s or company’s Twitter account.
• First comment: Spark conversation by making the first comment about your show!

Have you launched a show or content on Product Hunt for your brand? Let us know how it went in the comments! We’d love to hear your experience and any tips you have for success.

Prepare for launch!

Launching brand content on Product Hunt doesn’t seem so hard, does it? Why not go the extra mile and set up a post to feature your brand’s new show, especially if your B2B audience might be on Product Hunt. Go ahead and get some eyes on your content!

Be sure to stay tuned for part two of our Product Hunt experiment. We’ll fill everyone in on how our launch goes and whether or not we recommend adding the platform to your content distribution checklist.