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flo merian
flo merian Subscriber

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at read.cv

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How Jolt AI launched on Product Hunt

Early 2025, Jolt's founder, @yev_yev_yev reached out:

We're planning to launch Jolt AI on Product Hunt. Any advice for the launch?

Spoiler alert: We got featured on Product Hunt, ranked #3 Product of the Day, and #3 Developer Tool of the Week.

Here's why and how we planned the launch step by step.

Jolt AI on Product Hunt

why Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a place where many developer-first products launched successfully — Supabase, Resend, and Warp, to name a few.

According to similarweb.com, it gets 3M unique visitors every month and, according to Ahrefs, has a domain rating of 91.

As an early-stage company, launching on Product Hunt is an opportunity to raise awareness, get early feedback, and enable early traction.

setting up the launchpad

We started by working on the required inputs:

  • Product name: 40 characters max
  • Product tagline: 60 characters max
  • Product description: 260 characters max
  • Thumbnail: recommended size = 240*240px; maximum size = 2MB
  • Image gallery: optimized size = 1200*630; upload 3 or more images
  • Launch tags: up to 3 tags — see the full list here

You can find the required inputs here on GitHub.

Above all, we really polished the product tagline — the most important part according to Product Hunt's CEO, Rajiv Ayyangar. We considered multiple options and balanced simplicity and accuracy.

We opted out for this option:

AI assistant for 100k to multi-million line codebases
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how Product Hunt works

According to hunted.space, Product Hunt has the highest traffic/visibility on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We decided to launch on a Thursday to maximize exposure.

It started at 12:01 AM PST / 08:01 AM UTC by default.

For the first four hours of the day, Product Hunt hides upvotes and sorts the homepage randomly. According to Product Hunt, this should help products "get a chance to catch your interest."

Pro tip: As a workaround, we used hunted.space to view live trends.

This launch was an opportunity to get early feedback. We upvoted and replied to every comment on Product Hunt.

This launch was the opportunity to raise awareness, too. We posted it on socials (LinkedIn, X) and targeted communities, experimenting with different formats — shoutouts, behind-the-scenes, and memes.

Pro tip: We used dub.co, an open-source link management platform, to create a short, memorable URL and help us understand our audience and most-performing channels:

https://meooow.link/jolt
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results

The results in a nutshell:

  • 424 upvotes
  • 54 comments
  • #3 Product of the Day
  • #3 Developer Tool of the Week

What's next? Launching on Product Hunt definitely is not a one-time opportunity.

Awesome developer-first products like Stripe, Supabase, and Raycast, have launched there multiple times and we're gearing up to be part of this list.


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