How Amit got 100+ installs for Hiring Copilot’s chrome extensions from Product Hunt launch

A quick intro about Hiring Copilot

Hiring Copilot lets you find any email address from linkedin, send 1 click email drip sequences and personalize messages using GPT3.

Hiring Copilot launched on Product Hunt on February 3, 2023 & here is their launch performance:

1) Upvotes: 727
2) Day rank: 2
3) Traffic: 2150

Maker Interview

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you started your journey?

I am Amit, co-founder and CEO of Weekday. We are a recruitment startup which helps companies find software engineers who are vouched by other techies. This is my second startup. In my previous startup, I painfully found out just how difficult finding a software engineer is  – Especially at a stage where a wrong hire can make or break your startup. Having seen how difficult hiring was for us, we set out to solve this problem.

We believe that recruitment for highly skilled workers is very fast moving away from the traditional job posting (aka inbound) model to outbound driven model – where companies need to proactively reach out to potential hires. We plan to enable that via our automated approaches which help companies reach out to passive job seekers without using a bunch of manual tools.

What was your primary goal to launch Hiring Copilot on PH?

We were a little sceptical about doing a PH launch initially as our product was a niche product. It’s meant for founders and recruiters who actively take part in recruitment. But we then decided to go for it for multiple reasons:

1. The PH launch date gave us an artificial deadline to work towards which accelerated our product development and focused our efforts (note that we were in the process of building out the product when we decided to do a PH launch)
2. Acquire initial users who would give us initial feedback. We didn’t have a quantitative metric for it. We wanted to have a few users whose journey we could understand in order to make our product more seamless and useful.
   
   

At what phase did you decide to launch on Product Hunt?

We decided to do the PH launch when we were half-way stage in building out the product. We realised that we did not have a real finish line in terms of development as product development never stops. There is always building going on based on continuous user feedback.

Hence we decided to break down the product development into phases with first phase where we have just a good enough product to do a PH launch where users can sign up and use the product a little bit.

PH launch thus became a very good milestone for us to reach in our product development stage.

When did you start planning for the launch?

We started planning for the PH launch 3 weeks before the planned date. We followed the following actions plan:

Step 1: Talking to fellow founder friends of mine who had done PH launches earlier. Understand general Do’s and Don’ts.

Step 2: Contacted a PH community member who would be willing to hunt us (I got their contact via Step 1)

Step 3: Create 5 different versions of our messaging around our value proposition (on five different days so that I was writing a completely different framing of our proposition with a fresh perspective). Finalise the easiest-to-understand proposition from it.

Step 4: Let all my friends and team members know that we are planning a Ph launch and they should identify each social channel/groups which they can leverage to promote our launch

Step 5: Created the Intro video (via Tella) and screenshots 3 days prior to the launch

Step 6: Launched the product and shared it across all social networks we were part of.

Why did you choose to launch on a Friday? Any reason behind it?

We knew that weekdays are the days where PH has the most traffic with Tuesday to Thursday being the highest traffic days.

Higher traffic means a greater opportunity to get more users but it also meant that it would be equally harder to be in the top 3 on the highest traffic days (we also knew that it is the top 3 products that end up getting the most organic users).

So we chose a balance between the easiest days to rank higher on (ie Saturday/Sunday) and the highest traffic days (ie Tuesday to Thursday)

We noticed that you had a hunter for your launch. How did you choose your hunter and how did having the hunter help with your launch?

We were hunted by Kevin William David who has around 14k followers on PH. I believe with the new PH algorithm, having a hunter doesn’t make much difference in getting users as PH doesn’t send out notifications to followers on a new product hunted.

But still, we didn’t want to take chances and use every advantage accessible to us to get more users.

You weren’t very active in the product hunt community and social media to promote the launch. How did you get traffic to your launch and which traffic source contributed the most?

We have a newsletter with around 70k+ subscribers which we run for software engineers who have used our product in the past. It contributed the biggest source. Along with it, we also used our individual social networks to seed the initial upvotes.

What was your action plan on launch day?

Our action plan on launch day was very simple. We had made multiple versions of our messaging copy which we shared on LinkedIn, Twitter, Whatsapp and Facebook.

We have a team of around 60 people who also did the same. Around 4 hours into the launch, we sent out the newsletter and after that, we were just waiting and watching.

What are the tools you used to prepare for the launch?

1. Tella: Explainer video
2. Canva: Graphics
   
   

Could you share some numbers from your Product Hunt launch?

1. Website visitors: 2150 (500% Jump)
2. Sign-ups: 100+
   
   

What are 3 advices you would give to creators who’re launching on product hunt?

1. Have a very clear objective of why you are launching on PH.
2. Don’t chase the vanity metric of upvotes. Look for more real metrics like product usage.
3. Make sure to iterate on your one-liner a lot. This exercise will help a lot in future as well in terms of clarity of thought around your product.
   
   

Have you launched Hiring Copilot on any other platforms/communities before or after launching on the product hunt? If so, what are they and how did they perform?

We also did a launch on YC’s internal forum. YC Launch led to more quality feedback for us while PH launch led to larger volume.

What are your future plans? Are you launching any products or launching new versions for Hiring Copilot on Product Hunt?

Yes, we overwhelmingly received feedback on making it available for sales use cases as well. So I am planning to launch a new version in future.

Thanks a lot, Amit for sharing your Product Hunt strategies and secrets with us.

Checkout Hiring Copilot for more details.