How Ansy AI cracked top 3 on Product Hunt without a social media presence

A quick intro about Ansy

Ansy is a GPT-3 powered bot that gives instant replies in your Discord community based on the previous chat history.

Ansy launched on Product Hunt on Jan 23rd, 2023 & here is their Launch Performance:

1. Upvotes: 521
2. Day Rank: 2
3. Comments: 120

Nitish, Founder of Ansy, was the mind who pulled off its tremendous Product Hunt launch.

Maker Interview

Hi Nitish, Could you share about your journey, and how Ansy.ai started?

I spent 3 years in management consulting after graduating as a chemical engineer in 2016. But for a long time, I want to build something and try out my ideas. So I began my maker journey by building a voice messaging app and a small app on Slack.

Currently, my major focus is on bip.so which is a document collaboration platform targeted towards Discord communities.

While we were working on it, AI was getting popular and we got excited to build something around it.

Since we knew about Discord communities in and out, we knew the problem of community managers, who have to answer the same question over and over again.

So we decided to build Ansy using chatGPT which will automatically reply to questions based on past conversations.

That’s been my journey so far!!

How did you come across Product Hunt and how was your first launch 360Katas?

I used to visit Product Hunt often even when I didn’t have any products. So when we built our first slack app – 360Katas, we launched it on Product Hunt.

However, that launch didn’t do very well.

We pushed too much to get more upvotes by sharing in all our personal networks and asking our families to sign up and upvote. Most of our upvoters were first-timers who had just signed up to upvote our product. So Product Hunt figured out that most of our upvotes were not organic and pushed our product to the bottom on launch day.

GPT-3 and AI are one of the top trends on Product Hunt. Did you feel that marketing Ansy as GPT-3 Product helped you with the launch?

Of course. Positioning Ansy as a GPT3 product built for Discord made people curious about the product & made them want to try it out. So I would definitely say that it gave a boost to our launch.

At what phase did you decide to launch Ansy on Product Hunt? At beta stage or MVP or full product stage?

Our goal was to validate Ansy, we wanted to launch as soon as possible and get feedback. So we launched just at the start of beta.

What was your goal behind the launch?

Our goal was to validate our idea and to get more sign-ups. In fact, that’s why we launched Ansy as a paid product to check whether users are ready to pay for it or not.

How did you rank #2 on Product Hunt without a good social media presence?

I think these 3 will help you:

1. Have a good hunter.
2. Promote your launch in the relevant communities. members in the communities will always be ready to support you.
3. Try posting on LinkedIn. As we would have some followers there like school friends, college mates, and ex-colleagues, the reach would be better. And since everyone personally knows you, they will be excited to support you.
   
   

We noticed that KP Hunted your product. How did having a popular hunter like KP help your product launch?

I think having a great hunter will put you at the top of the day’s listing in the initial hours of launch. Also, having a prominent hunter adds credibility to your product.

How long did you plan for the launch of Ansy and what was your launch strategy?

Like I said earlier, We did a lot of things wrong when we launched our first slack product on PH. We drove as much traffic as possible to get upvotes but got penalized. So we understood that Product Hunt prefers organic upvotes ( upvotes from actual Product Hunt users) and ranks based on that.

So for the Ansy launch, we decided that we will not promote it on other platforms and try to get as many organic upvotes as possible.

To make Product Hunt visitors upvote you, you should make your listing great. You should create a nice GIF, Tagline, Description, First comment and Product images.

We put our most effort there instead of creating noise on other platforms.

And for the initial boost, we got a good hunter and we planned some posts on social media.

Here is our strategy:
Get a prominent hunter → Make the listing look good → Put our product in front of seasonal Product Hunt visitors and let them try our product.

What was your action plan on the launch day?

Our whole team was involved in the launch.

When the launch went live:

1. I was looking at the comments in the first 2 hours.
2. The rest of them started sharing the launch posts on Social Media.

Then, I took a break for a while. From there on:

1. Our team from India took care of the comments section.
2. Some of our team members started reaching out to their social network.

In the last 2 hours of launch, we wanted to give an extra push. So we shared about our launch on FB groups and WhatsApp communities.

Also, we divided the whole launch into batches and assigned members to each batch. If you see our social media posts you would notice that they came out in intervals.

The reason for that is we didn’t want a huge spike of upvotes in the first 2 hours. We wanted to spread out the upvotes throughout the day.

Where are your top traffic sources for the launch?

However, we promoted our launch on these platforms:

1. Twitter
2. LinkedIn
3. Reddit and
4. WhatsApp groups
   
   

We noticed that you mentioned an easter egg in your first comment – what was your inspiration behind that and how did it help with your Product Hunt launch?

It definitely helped get more signups. People coming to Product Hunt are usually in the exploratory phase, and we wanted to convert them into our customers.

To convert them, we first needed to get them to try Ansy and that’s how we arrived at the Easter egg concept.

Did you offer any discount on the launch day?

Yeah, we offered 50% off on our plans on launch day. But surprisingly, people haven’t used promo codes except for 1 or 2.

What are the 3 advice you would give to creators who are launching on Product Hunt?

1. Focus a lot on the listing (GIF, Title, Tagline, Description, and first comment)
2. Don’t focus too much on reaching out to people who are new to Product Hunt.
3. Spread the outreach throughout the day.

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

Checkout Ansy for more details.