Find Product Hunt supporters without breaking the rules

Build a list of real supporters and tell them about your launch the allowed way.

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium
Updated

Product Hunt does not let you ask people to upvote, pay for upvotes, or reward them. So the useful version of this tactic is finding people who care about your category and telling them your launch exists. The rules are below, then what you can do within them.

What Product Hunt's rules say

  • The Community Guidelines list "Mass messaging users, asking for upvotes, using bots, incentivizing upvotes" as unacceptable. Violations can lead to removal or suspension of your account and products.
  • Product Hunt's help center answers "Can I ask my community, friends, family to upvote a product?" with "Please don't." It adds that people should upvote what they like on their own, and that asking or incentivizing can drop your ranking or remove you from the homepage.
  • The launch sharing guide tells makers to ask for "feedback, comments, opinions, help spreading the word, not for upvotes." Contests that require or reward upvotes are not allowed, and continuing can get your product unfeatured.
  • Product Hunt says it removes votes it deems non-genuine and monitors point changes during a launch.

That rules out buying upvotes, upvote swaps, and vote groups. It also covers bots and any tool that automates voting.

How to do it within the rules

  1. Build your audience before launch day, from places you already own. Product Hunt's sharing guide says of email: "This is one of your strongest tools." Collect emails from your site, your users and your beta testers.
  2. Follow and take part in your category on Product Hunt well before you launch. Comment on similar launches with something useful. People you have talked with in public will recognise you later.
  3. Make a short list of people who have written about or built in your category: makers, newsletter authors, people who comment on similar launches. Contact each one by hand, only if you have something specific to say to them.
  4. Ask on launch day for what Product Hunt allows. Send your list the launch link and ask for feedback, a comment, or a share. Do not write "please upvote" anywhere, including on X, LinkedIn or Slack.
  5. Reply to every comment on your launch page that day. Real conversation is the part of a launch you can control.
  6. Give people a reason to come that has nothing to do with votes, such as a launch-day offer on a dedicated page. Never tie the offer to upvoting.

Examples

Product Hunt's own Launch Guide describes the approved route: it says "you cannot ask people directly to upvote your product" and tells makers to ask people to visit and comment.

When it backfires

  • Scraping voters and messaging them. The old version of this tactic used a no-code tool to pull the people who upvoted similar products, then follow them on X and message them. Mass messaging is on Product Hunt's prohibited list, and X's Authenticity policy prohibits "engaging with posts aggressively or through the use of automation to drive traffic or attention to accounts, websites, products, services, or initiatives."
  • Product Hunt's API is not for this. Its docs say that by default the API must not be used for commercial purposes.
  • A launch built on votes you asked for. Product Hunt can remove the votes, drop the ranking, or unfeature the product. You also lose the trust of the exact people you wanted to reach.
  • Coordinated bursts. Product Hunt's fair-voting page tells makers to avoid overtly coordinated campaigns that could look artificial.

Questions people ask

Can I buy Product Hunt upvotes? No. The Community Guidelines list incentivizing upvotes as unacceptable, and Product Hunt removes votes it judges non-genuine. A purchased vote can cost you the launch.

Is there a Product Hunt upvoter extractor? The old version of this tactic used Phantombuster to pull upvoters of similar products. Messaging those people in bulk runs into the mass-messaging rule above. Reaching a few people one by one, with a real reason, is a different thing.

How do I get free Product Hunt upvotes? You do not request them. Launch something people find useful, tell your own audience it is live, and ask for comments and feedback.

Sources

Launching soon? This is one of the pre-launch marketing tactics, listed in the order to start them.

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