From #96 to #12 on ProductHunt: What I Learned

Hi, I'm Luke. I'm a software developer and entrepreneur.

I've launched a handful of products in my life, the biggest ones being MyMobileMods, Biblify.ai, and now Doclific.

Each one of these projects I did entirely by myself. No graphic designers. No UI/UX designers. Nothing.

When I originally launched MyMobileMods, my first project, this was my ProductHunt listing. I essentially just added some horrible screenshots and a random video I made. I didn't explain the product particularly well. I asked all my family members and friends to make accounts and upvote it (big mistake). It did alright; maybe top 100, but was hidden early on and lost its rank because of the "spam" accounts (really just my friends and family) that upvoted it. The product itself was buggy and, honestly, kind of ugly. I should have taken more time to polish it before launching.

After that, I launched Biblify.ai: https://www.producthunt.com/products/biblify-ai. This product was objectively better than MyMobileMods. It was more polished and genuinely useful. However, I still put no effort into the images, only uploading a single screenshot/mockup of the application. It ended up getting a handful of upvotes, ranking #96 for the day.

Today, I launched Doclific: https://www.producthunt.com/products/doclific. Yes, it's still early in the day, but it looks pretty likely that I'll end up in at least the top 15 products for the day. Not bad. Here's what changed:

1. I focused on my images and content. I paid $30 to use Screen Studio on Mac (an amazing product btw). This allowed me to create amazing screen recordings and beautiful screenshots too. I learned how to use Figma and spent hours perfecting my images and screen recordings. From a technical perspective, these tasks seem unimportant, but I'm slowly discovering that if you're going to be a solopreneur, it's essential. You can't just focus on the parts you like. In fact, you should probably be spending extra time on the parts you don't like because you're probably worse at them.
2. I still sent the ProductHunt link to people, but I chose them more carefully. People already in the tech space or people were the best options. I avoided people not in that space and people that don't already have an account. It's not the worth the risk of potentially getting shadow banned or unranked.
3. I posted on LinkedIn. This was actually a decent help. As long as you have a decent post, LinkedIn will share it with randos, so I actually got some decent engagement from that. I also posted multiple times already.

If you have any other suggestions or just questions, I'd love to hear them.