Know the Best Time to Post on Product Hunt

Whether you are hunting your product by yourself or getting a famous hunter, it’s very important to know the perfect timing to launch.

And before I tell you the 1-line answer of what’s the best time to post on Product Hunt, let’s understand how it all works.

The products that get featured on the Product Hunt’s homepage are based on a 24-hour cycle i.e. 12:01 am PT to 12:00 am PT. Meaning, your product can only be featured on the PH homepage till 11:59 pm PT the same day.

Please note that Product Hunt doesn’t adjust its time zones automatically, it follows the PT (Pacific Timezone) only. So, be sure to double-check your timings in PT.

So, how to know what’s the best time

The perfect product doesn’t exist.

No matter how prepared you are for the launch, your product is not going to be perfect. You need to get users’ feedback and iterate fast. Keep your team ready.

Rob Fitzpatrick advises to get 1 delighted user at first, then 5, and then 10. Ask for their feedback, iterate fast. Let your existing users bring more users. Focus on organic growth and user retention. And when all this happens, it’s time to get tactical about the Product Hunt and Hacker News like platforms.

Ultimately, your goal should be to keep your product on the Product Hunt homepage for the maximum amount of time so that more and more people see it.

But the important thing is, you don’t just have to look at the time. To know the best time, you need to look at the 2 following things:

Time, and
Weekday

Look for Time and Week Day for PH Launch

Best time to post on Product Hunt

Well, it’s a no brainer.

As Product Hunt follows the 12:01 am to 12:00 am PT (24-hour) cycle, and launching at 12:01 am PT gets the benefit of the whole 24-hour window.

Yes, most upvotes are received between 5-8 am PT but that doesn’t mean you need to post in that period only.

📢 Generally, 12:01 am – 1:00 am in Pacific Timezone is the best time to launch on Product Hunt.

Best day to post on Product Hunt

There’s a huge difference between launching on Tuesday vs launching on Saturday — it’s not the same.

Most of the upvotes and comments come in the middle of the week.

Kartik Mandaville analyzed the Product Hunt data and found out that products that are launched on Tuesday get the most traction – Saturday and Sunday the least.

Again, the data doesn’t precisely tell that launching on Tuesday automatically gets you the max benefits. It’s incomplete because the competition is also high during the middle of the week.

Some report that Sunday worked the best for them, while some advice launching on Tuesday. But overall, a perfect launch day will be:

when your audience stays online – generally, not a national holiday or a festival day, and
when biggies (Google, Facebook, or others) do not launch a new product on the day

When a few biggies launch new products on the same day, top positions get occupied by them (most probably) and your chances of getting into the featured become low.

While knowing about the national holidays and festive days is easy, it’s difficult to know if a big product is going to be launched on a day. But here’s a (quite vague) trick:

Do not launch at the exact 12:01 am PT
Wait for 30-60 minutes and see if any biggies are launched
If yes, wait for the next day
If no, launch immediately

There’s no guarantee that no big products will be launched after 1:00 am though. There’s a bit of luck involved too.

Another important thing to note is that Product Hunt doesn’t send top products newsletter on weekends. This means Saturdays and Sundays are not the best days to launch. I mean, the Product Hunt newsletter has hundreds of thousands of readers and there’s no point to miss that.

📢 To summarize, launching on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday definitely bring more traffic and engagement but the competition is high on these days too.

Launching in the middle of the week may be beneficial when your product has an existing userbase and you can somehow manage to remain in the top 10
Launching on the other remaining days may be beneficial when your product is completely new and you don’t have an existing userbase

Again, it’s a very generic statement, it can’t be suitable for all cases.

Now that you understand the basic concepts of choosing the best possible days and time, should you be staring at your watch to launch at 12:01 am PT?

Well, the best thing is, Product Hunt lets you schedule your product launch in advance so that you don’t need to keep yourself up at weird hours.

For example, 12:00 am PDT would be 2:00 am in Chicago which is very unusual to be awake and manually launch at the time.

So, how to schedule a Product Hunt launch

After you put in all the basic information (like product name, tagline, description, images, etc.), you will get the option of Schedule Launch or Launch Now.

Launch Now - Schedule Launch — 1. Click on the Schedule Launch button

If you like to schedule your product to go live on a specific date and time, you need to click the Schedule Now button and then select the date and time (in PT).

Set Schedule - Product Hunt — 2. Select the suitable Date and Time

Product Hunt allows to schedule a maximum of 7 days in advance from the current day.

After the product goes live, do not forget to follow the important post-launch tips.

Wrapping it up

Following all the tips and techniques mentioned here will definitely maximize the chances of getting into the top 5. But not to forget that you should have a great product and a bit of luck is involved too.

Also, you always have an option to re-launch on Product Hunt if you fail the first time.

That’s it.

Are you using some other strategies to choose the best time to post on Product Hunt or maybe you have a related query? Either way, let me know by dropping a quick comment below.