How to Increase Followers on Product Hunt

Here are the tips and tricks on how to increase followers on Product Hunt. With consistency and valuable interaction you can quickly build a following to support a your Product Hunt Launches.

Is it Important to Have Followers on Product Hunt?

I thought we should start with this fundamental question!

It will really depend on what your goals are with respect to Product Hunt. Are you going to be a serial launcher, are you just launching one product, or are you looking to be an influencer?

It also depends on the type of product that you’re launching too as products focused on the Indie Hackers and Startups tend to perform better overall. If you’d like to find out more I did a whole post on the topic:

How to Increase Followers on Product Hunt

1 – The Quickest Way to Increase Followers on Product Hunt

The quickest way to increase your number of followers is to Make something and Launch it on Product Hunt. Those with the highest number of followers are those that have been prolific or successful Makers turned Hunters.

If that’s not quite an option yet then here are some other ways that you can grow a following without having launched yet and I’ll go into those next.

2 – Engagement on the Product Hunt Forum

Participate in Discussions

Product Hunt comes with a pretty lively discussion forum that you can participate and engage with members on. This has been the primary way that I’ve picked up followers.

People will often post on product hunt for a number of reasons including:

• Asking for support for their launches
• Asking questions about their own field – for example trying to understand their own target market and getting some user feedback
• Looking for Early Adopters or Beta Testers
• Understanding how Product Hunt works – gaining followers, hunters, ship etc.
• General Indie Hacking topics like productivity, interests, motivational pieces

Now even if you’ve never launched on Product Hunt before you’re going to be able to respond to a lot of those questions. 

So I’d recommend for anyone just starting out to just participate in the forum and engage with other members. You can find the Product Hunt discussion forum here

Asking Questions and Starting Discussions

Instead of participating in Discussions you can actually start them. Of course you can use this to your advantage and ask questions that you need some answers to. There’s no reason why this can’t fit in with the rest of your content strategy as well.

So for example if you’re asking the questions on Twitter no reason why you couldn’t reuse that content and ask on Product Hunt (you could also do this with Indie Hackers).

My only warning for this is that sometimes I see people asking questions that their product directly solves. This doesn’t come across as genuine and is a real turn off for me personally!

Supporting Others in the Product Hunt Community

I’m a firm believer in trying to help others – and the great thing about the Product Hunt platform is that it’s filled with people looking for help and support.  So give them the help they need and inevitably you’ll pickup followers as a kind of thank you on the way.

I’ve tried to take this a bit further and promote those that I feel have some great value to add to people.  I’ll give you a few examples here:

I found the Wannabe Entrepreneur Podcast through Product Hunt, and it’s one that I really enjoy.  It’s target market are the bootstrappers and Indie Hackers of this world, a lot of those on Product Hunt.  So when people ask for Podcast recommendations I always tag Tiago and mention his Podcast and community.  I do a similar thing for the Indie Dads Podcast by Bryan and Malcolm too. I do that for a few different people on the platform like Tony Dinh and his product Black Magic, or Roberto Robles and his simple SEO tool Katlinks.

Supporting Launches on Product Hunt

Probably the most impactful activity you can do on Product Hunt is to support other makers and their launches. Launches are the culmination of a lot of work and anyone that you support will be grateful.

There are a couple of things you can do:

1. Upvote the Products that you want to support
2. Comment on the launches of those products
3. Review the product

When I say comment on the launches of those products – try and think of something beyond “congrats on the launch”. Think about what value you can add to that launch; start a conversation, suggest a product feature, or suggest a potential user.

Don’t be spammy and go through and vote on every single product either, just pick one or two a day that you want to support, it’ll come across much more genuine! Check out the latest launches here

Bonus – Market your Product Hunt Profile Elsewhere

If you have a following on other platforms – particularly on Indie Hackers then you can promote your own profile and ask for people to connect on those platforms too. It’s a strategy that I’ve seen commonly used for people looking to increase their LinkedIn following so I think could be used for Product Hunt too.

Any Other Suggestions From You?

I’d love to hear any other suggestions you might have, just leave a comment below 👇👇