One of the key decisions you’re going to have to make for your Product Hunt Launch is the day of the week you’re going to choose. Yes it matters, and yes it depends on a number of factors!
What Does the Data Tell Us about the day of the Product Hunt Launch?
It’s important to consider the data when it comes to which day that you launch on Product Hunt. That’s because there’s a correlation between the number of products launch, upvotes, and therefore potential traffic and eventual conversions to your own site. But to be informed lets have a look at the data, and there are two resources I’m using for this:
Statsph (sadly no longer in existence!) and LaunchKitty
Having a look at the launch Kitty stats first you can see that the peak periods for both the number of launches and the number of upvotes appears to be Monday through Thursday. Saturday and Sunday perform poorly in both categories.
Launch Kitty arguably has the more detailed information. This data is taken from the period of January 1, 2021 to June 30, 2021.
As you can see from the chart below Tuesday and Wednesday are the most popular days of the week to launch with on average 47 products launching on those days. Again as per the 2022 data Saturday and Sunday perform poorly in terms of absolute number of launches. Click on the image to expand.
The number of upvotes for each day follows a similar pattern as already shown with Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday showing the highest number of upvotes. Again similarly Saturday and Sunday perform poorly. (Click to expand)
Summary – What Does the Product Hunt Launch Day Data Tell Us?
So the takeaway from the data is that there is more competition in the weekdays with the most being Tuesday-Thursday. Correlating with that is that there’s also an increase number of upvotes during those days.
Opposing that are Saturday and Sunday which see both the fewest launches and the fewest upvotes.
Both of these facts align with what you hear anecdotally on the Product Hunt forums – so use this as part of your own decision making process.
So How to Pick the Day of Your Product Hunt Launch?
What are your goals?
This is probably the most important factor to think about – What are your goals for your product hunt launch? Is the launch just right of passage as an Indie Hacker or are you trying to acquire users, or something else?
When I asked people what their main goals for picking the Day of their Product Hunt Launch they fell into the following categories:
- Social Proof
- Traffic
- Readiness/Milestone Driven
- Resource Constraints
Social Proof
If your goal is to get to one of the top 5 positions on Product Hunt or even aspire to get Product of the day then you’re essentially after social proof. Having that badge to display on your website could go a long way to help in acquiring future users.
Now if you’re confident in your product and your marketing efforts then you could opt to launch any day of the week – because competition isn’t going to matter to you. If you’re concerned though you might be worth opting for a weekend in order to improve your chances of hitting one of the top 5 spots.
Traffic
If you’re less orientated towards getting social proof, or see it as a bonus then you should be looking towards the higher traffic. This will suit people that are launching products where they are trying to attract the Product Hunt audience to sign-up and use their product. In which case you should be picking a weekday as a minimum or preferably Tuesday-Thursday.
Readiness/Milestone Driven
Now you might already have a specific days or dates in mind. For example you’ve already planned to launch on the 1st of the month or the first day of the week. Thursday launched their products on a Thursday for brandings purposes, another example launched a book App on National Reading Day! 📕
Resource Constraints
The final factor that might influence your decision is based on the resources you have available. A Product Hunt launch that’s optimized involves a lot of effort in coordination and promotion and you’ll need the resources to do that. In addition successful launches might results in some addition challenges during and after the launch – will the servers for example.
So you need to decide which day of the week can you commit to the launch and if you’re part of a team then can the team support it as well.
Good Luck with your Launch 🚀🚀
Feel free to leave any comments for other ideas you have on this topic!
