One of the early milestones of Bardeen was the first launch on Product Hunt. It was a massive moment for the team, and it helped us build much-needed traction to get us to where we are today.
So back in August when we made some major updates to our core product, we decided to “re-launch”. At the end of that day, we had over 900 upvotes, hundreds of comments, and plenty of new leads. Oh, and we were Product of the Day!
Since then many people have asked how we managed our launch. There weren’t any secrets; we rallied our users, engaged with all the upvoters, and shared our launch with the broader community.
We did all of this using Bardeen every step of the way.
I wrote this article to share some of the playbooks we built to make the launch successful.
Pre-launch: Building a list of supporters
If I’ve learned anything about launches, it’s that momentum matters. For Product Hunt, where your launch goes live at 12:01 am, the first hour after your post goes live is the most important. There are many reasons for this, but most importantly, people will see your post on the homepage in the morning.
We used a few playbooks here to build a list of supporters we planned to message at 12:01 am.
Supporters from our previous launch
Our first launch on ProductHunt was quite successful (also #1). We wanted to leverage the following we built that day by reaching out to everyone who supported us.
Usually, this would be an incredibly repetitive task; some founders recommended hiring a few contractors.
But at Bardeen we had an alternative. A set of playbooks to extract, then find contact info automatically.
Playbook 1: Scrape commenters from ProductHunt Page
The anatomy of most scraping tasks using Bardeen involves:
- Scraping a collection page: Creating a list of people, companies, products, complete with URLs that feed the second step.
- Scraping the details page: In this case the Product Hunt profile.
- Find contact information and send some messages or emails!
With Product Hunt, we start on the product listing page of our previous launch and scrape the commenters. As with most Bardeen playbooks, you really need to see it to believe it, so take a look.
Playbook 2: Find social links of ProductHunt Profiles
Once we have the list of commenters, we visit everyone's profiles to find a way to reach them.
Playbook 3: Finding fellow makers and builders
Makers are incredibly supportive of each other, especially in the Product Hunt community. Prior to our launch, we reached out to multiple LinkedIn groups and products that were launching soon. Here are the playbooks that helped us:
12:01am It Begins!
Once our listing was public, the entire team reached out to their network to support our launch.
Since our company is remote and spread across Europe and North America, we were online for the entire launch. By morning in San Francisco, we were solidly in first place and gaining even more traction.
For the rest of the day our priorities were:
- Respond to every commenter
- Support new users testing the product
- Encourage our network to support the launch
Here’s some of the more interesting playbooks we built:
Needless to say, our position didn’t budge for the rest of the day…
Bardeen at Bardeen
We set out to automate all the annoying repetitive tasks that eat up your day. This includes our own tasks here at Bardeen! From customer service, to sales, to the small tactical projects like our last Product Hunt launch.
Stay tuned for more!
