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A Successful Product Hunt Launch: From 2000 Upvotes to “Product of the Year” and a $4.5M Seed Investment

What does Sessions do?

Sessions helps teams run efficient customer-facing meetings. The platform provides tools, resources, apps, and access to information teams need to create everything from sales pitches, product demos, onboarding, and training sessions to webinars.

Winning against Zoom

But back to the launch. We started the day early to land as fast as possible on the Featured feed. This way, when most of Product Hunt’s audience was active, we’d already be in a top place. With high hopes, we were ready to work hard to earn our spot, and then… boom!

Soon after, Zoom also launched on Product Hunt. It’s an understatement to say that our startup had incredible competition, with Zoom being the benchmark for all other video-conferencing platforms at that time. Yet we still managed to win . How?

Behind the scenes

Remember: launching on Product Hunt is more than a one-day event. The actual preparation should start months in advance. Nothing guarantees success, but your chances increase once you know the game’s rules and have a clear strategy.

Here are four things that, from Sessions’ experience, you should consider when launching on Product Hunt:

Start with research

The best and safest thing you can do is to understand how Product Hunt works and how to make the best of it. Look for similar products that launched in the past. Discuss with other successful hunters and makers to discover their approach to tackling this platform. They can give you great insights and practical, actionable advice.

You can also review this Product Hunt’s guide, which tells you what you should know for your pre-launch game. It’s also helpful to look at their Time Travel or Upcoming Products feature.

Have a plan

If there’s one situation where you shouldn’t just “go with the flow,” it’s your product launch. The key to a resounding success is to know what you want and plan how to get there. It starts with anticipating when the product will be ready and continues with choosing a date to launch. Make sure to check for holidays or events that could negatively impact engagement.

Also, choosing the right day is essential, depending on your goal for the launch. If you want an easy #1 Product of the Day win, launch on Sundays or weekends when there’s less competition. However, you’ll have less reach too.

If you want users, traffic, and engagement, opt for a Wednesday. It’s the platform’s busiest and most active day. Still, the downside is that you could have serious competition from big companies like Tesla, Apple, Notion, Netflix, and Spotify, which have all successfully launched on Product Hunt.

Shout it from the rooftops

There are many ways to raise awareness about your product and launch. Here are only two of the strategies that worked for Sessions:

Use Social Media to prepare your users and followers for the big day. Make it easy for them to find you on Product Hunt: share the link on all the platforms you and your team have a following.
Find tech enthusiasts open to trying new things and invite them to review your product on the launch day. Many dedicated groups of Product Hunt users will be more than willing to try your product and leave feedback. You can easily find them on Facebook, Discord, or Slack.

Call on your people

There’s one more critical thing than weeks of preparation, research, and strategy. It even prevailed over Zoom’s worldwide fame. For us, it’s undisputedly the ingredient that led to our successful launch and overall evolution as a product: the people.

Our community supported the product on the big day by upvoting, reviewing, and spreading the word everywhere on the Internet. They were the ones that led Sessions to victory. We’ve been fortunate enough to see the power of a community in action, and we’ve been lucky to see it grow ever since.

We’ve also been privileged enough to have fantastic Product Hunt people on our side like Ben Lang, our hunter and Head of Community at Notion. Other VIPs like Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt and Chris Messina, the hashtag inventor, upvoted us too.

After-launch evolution: Product of the Year & $4.5M seed round

The feedback we received then and the valuable people who joined our community guided Sessions to a much-improved version. In less than 12 months, the platform had:

A major level-up
Another 12 integrations added
20+ new features developed
Users from 144 countries
Over 2000 company accounts
A new B2B approach

Our community’s involvement culminated at the Golden Kitty Awards 2021, Product Hunt’s annual celebration of the best products and makers. Courtesy of their support, Sessions won the “Product of the Year” distinction for the category “Work from Anywhere.”

However, the most exciting event so far is that Sessions raised a $4.5 million seed round. We are deeply grateful that Earlybird Venture Capital, Stride.VC, and LAUNCHub Ventures are strong supporters of our vision and back us to change the future of work by becoming the disrupter the B2B communication & collaboration space so desperately needs.

Product Hunt’s merits

The truth is, we wouldn’t be here today without having launched a year ago on Product Hunt. This event was more than a day of great engagement for our platform. It was the jump-start to a chain of events:

reaching in a short amount of time great people from all walks of life (who otherwise would’ve taken us months to find),
winning Product of the Year,
raising a $4.5 M seed round a few months later.

Sessions is on a mission to challenge and redefine the global market of traditional video conferencing tools. We started this journey to solve the problem of extreme fragmentation and complexity in companies’ day-to-day remote communication and collaboration. To upgrade substandard business video meetings into highly engaging sessions.

Product Hunt contributed by connecting us with the right people who made it possible to grow fast. It put us on the path of those who matter the most for tech startups, the ones who help you reach new milestones.

Visit 👉 sessions.us