This is a pretty smart monetization strategy by the team over at PH. So if you have a personal connection to a major industry influencer, or have someone like that on your board, or can simply convince an influencer to subscribe to your product then you can still reap this benefit. In the past if you were able to recruit an influencer with a large following to hunt your product on launch day, it would automatically notify all of their followers via email that they had hunted your product driving a ton of traffic and upvotes to your page. I'm talking a Jason Lemkin or a Hiten Shah type. In all honesty, there used to be a pretty fool proof way to all but guarantee a successful launch on Product Hunt if you could just pull it off getting an influencer with a large following to "hunt" your product. Ship represents a massive opportunity for influencer marketing and virality. This was also helpful to me because it allowed me to reach out to the Product Hunt team in advance and let them know exactly when we were planning to launch (more on why I did this shortly). This is definitely helpful in terms of planning your launch you can set expectations with your internal team in terms of exactly when your product will launch, and you can easily schedule other promotional activities to work in tandem with your selected launch time. Without Ship, you need to fill out all of information required to launch a product in real-time per se what this means in practice is that it's been the norm for people to wake up at ungodly hours to launch their product, maximize the amount of time they have to accumulate upvotes, and get something of a first-mover advantage.
Ship allows you to schedule your launch on Product Hunt. Honestly this is mostly a convenience thing, but it's a nice perk of using Ship. I realized a few benefits from using Ship. I will admit that I was at first skeptical about Ship, but I decided to pony up the $79 per month to give the product a whirl. Product Hunt's Ship product is a suite of tools designed to help you gather product feedback and build an audience prior to officially launching your product on Product Hunt. Second, I'll give an honest assessment of my own experience in terms of what worked for us and what didn't. The reason for this post is twofold first, the best way to launch on Product Hunt has changed pretty dramatically, so a lot of the content that's already out there is outdated.
My first piece of advice is to take it straight from the horse's mouth - Product Hunt has published two guides on the topic themselves. There are plenty of "How To Launch On Product Hunt" guides already out there, and I've devoured most of them at this point. Product Hunt is the best site of its kind, followed by Betalist both sites represent a unique opportunity for early stage start-ups to gather product feedback and land their first users. In the past few months I've been involved with launching a number of SaaS products on Product Hunt, a community where early adopters discover the latest new technology products.