How Humalect became #1 Product of the day without social media promotion

A quick intro about Humalect

Humalect is a platform that lets developers deploy end to end applications on Kubernetes in Minutes.

Rajesh launch Humalect on Apr 25, 2023 on Product Hunt and here is how their launch performed:

1. Upvotes: 767
2. Comments: 256
3. Rank of the Day: 1
4. Rank of the Week: 3

Let’s unlock all their launch strategies and secrets

Maker Interview

Hi Rajesh, Could you tell us a little bit about your journey and how you started Humalect?

I began my career in Devops. I started working as a Devop engineer at an enterprise company and then I moved to a startup and worked as a devops engineer there. During my work, I found that there are a lot of problems in the devops space. So I decided to quit my job and solve that. That’s how I started Humalect.

What were your goals of launching on Product Hunt?

Our product has 2 kind of user personas:

1. Those Who purchase the product (generally the CTO’s of a company) and
2. Then the end user of the product, which can be a devops engineer or a software engineer.

Our goal was to reach the latter with our product hunt launch. We wanted to put our product in front of software engineers and technical users on product hunt to try it out. Because if they like it, they can convince the CTO to purchase our product.

At what phase did you launch your product?

We had a finished product in hand with users who have been using it for 9-10 months. Before launching on Product Hunt, we did a few soft launches on Linkedin and other communities. Once we were done validating and we felt it’s fine, we launched on product hunt.

Any reason behind launching your product after 10 months of building it?

Humalect is not a micro product or a single feature product. We are taking ownership of complete infrastructure, scalability and security of our customers. And If we did something wrong, everything on the client’s side goes down.There are a lot of dynamics involved in our product. So, before going global, we wanted to make sure that everything works.

Why did you choose a hunter for your launch? And did you collaborate with the hunter to prepare launch assets?

Rohan (our hunter) is a good friend of mine and a well know person in Product Hunt communities. He has some good launches behind him and runs great communities for makers. That’s why I asked him, if he can hunt Humalect and he agreed. 

We had a marketing team, with one person for every role (like for designing and marketing). So, there was no need to collaborate on that.

What was your launch plan?

We started planning for the launch one month before. We were clear that this has to be an orchestrated launch, So we started looking for strong channels that will drive traffic to our launch.

The number one channel was our existing users. We made a list of our existing users from our community and we made sure that they have Product Hunt profiles. Most of our users might not be on product hunt, so we reached out to them few weeks in advance and asked them to create Product Hunt account, so that they can support out launch.

And there were some developer communities where we promoted our launch. We attached an offer to our launch in those communities.

Then we made sure all of our employees have a Product Hunt profile and listed all of them as makers, so that they can engage with other people in PH.

One week before, we scheduled the launch and put a teaser for our launch. We promoted the teaser and asked people to subscribe for the launch.

We worked on graphics and video for the launch after that. We also worked on other assets like description and first comment.

These were the things that we did to get ready for the launch.

As we got closer to launch, we wanted to make sure that Product Hunt community knew that we are launching. So we planned to do 4-5 posts on the product hunt discussions.

We wrote a post before going live, sharing we are going live tomorrow and to checkout the launch.

On the launch day – 4 hours after we went live, we were on #2 position. So we wrote a post on discussions that said “We are ranking on #2, AMA”.

At midnight, we were still #2, So we posted a post “3 tips for product hunt launch” and that post took off. My post was shown in the Product Hunt home page which brought some more traffic.

These posts helped us to engage with the people on Product Hunt.

Just before your launch, Product Hunt introduced the new system where products are shown in random order for the first 4 hours. How did you plan your launch for those 4 hours?

We made a list of the users to reach out for the launch (as mentioned previously), and we didn’t want to exhaust them in the first 4 hours. All the team members had a list of 120-130 people to reach out. But we didn’t want to get all the upvotes in the first 4 hours and then become a flat line in the mid night. So, we made sure that everyone should reach out to 10-12 people per hour. So the max we reached out is 40-50 per hour. By observing the previous trends, we understood that you need 500-600 upvotes to be in top 3. From that, we calculated that we need 30 upvotes per hour. And, to get that 30 upvotes, we had to reach out to 40 – 50 people. Our reachout was very calculated and controlled that way.

Did you send any email blast to your subscribers on the launch day?

No, there were 2 reasons we avoided sending an email blast.

1. Email is not very personal. We have already reached out to users before 2 weeks and checked whether they are willing to support or not. On the launch day, we reached out to only those who replied that they are interested to support our launch.
2. Also, we were not very sure that our users had PH profiles. If we made our users create new accounts on launch day just to support our launch, it might work against us since Product Hunt could see it as spam.

That’s why we haven’t done email blast.

What was your top traffic source for your product hunt launch?

It was 1-1 reachouts. We are a small team of 3-4 people who did these reachouts. No automations, no scheduling campaigns or anything, we wanted to be very personal.

You had some trouble from bot accounts in the middle of launch: what happened exactly and how did you solve it?

This was at around midnight on launch day. We were in number 2 position and we slid down all of a sudden. Suddenly the upvote difference between our product and the product that overtook us increased exponentially (which didn’t look organic) We weren’t sure what was happening, so I reached out to PH team and after 30 minutes, their team resolved the issue and we claimed the number 1 spot product hunt. PH team is very helpful, this would have become a very difficult night if they didn’t help us.

How did you divide your team for the launch on the launch day?

Marketing team – Reachout, 3 posts on social media, and 4 posts on product Hunt
Technical team – Monitor the tool, database, and make sure eveything is fine.

Could you share some numbers from your launch?

1. 100+ signups
2. 1000+ visits
   
   

What are the 3 advice you would give to the makers who are going to launch on Product Hunt?

1. Do not launch without planning.
2. There is a lot of physical tiredness on the launch day. And, you have to fight it. You need stay disciplined for 3-4 days before the launch
3. Have fun with your team.

Have you promoted on any other platform other than Product Hunt?

We launched on Linkedin as every developer has a Linkedin profile. So, we built a community on Linkedin. We got good response from Linkedin as the user persona is perfect. And then, now we started building our community on Slack because every developer is using slack at work.

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

Checkout Humalect for more details.