I got to #3 of the day on Product Hunt! Here's what actually worked.

So I made a macOS menubar app called Chunk. It's a timeblocking tool for people like me who want to plan their day in a visual, ADHD-friendly way. I’d never marketed anything before, so naturally I just... googled it. Product Hunt came up a lot, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

The first time I launched, it was super half-arsed. I just threw it up there, no video, no proper graphics, nothing polished. It got 10 upvotes. Honestly, I was pretty happy with that. I thought, “Hey, ten strangers clicked a button for me, not bad!”

But a week later I realised I’d totally rushed it. No video. No good screenshots. It didn’t represent the work I’d put into the app at all.

So I waited a bit, made a few updates to the app, and decided to try relaunching — this time actually putting some effort into it. My only cost for the entire launch was my Canva subscription (seriously, irreplaceable).

For 3 days I watched Product Hunt closely and took screenshots of all the slides and assets from the top 3 products each day. I knew those teams probably had designers and marketers behind them, but I figured: why not just copy the format?

So I made clean slides using a classy gradient, stuck my logo on everything, and kept the text informative and minimal. Just stuff I’d want to know if I were skimming.

The video was the hard part. I planned out the exact features I wanted to show, then filmed myself using the app... over and over until I managed a clean take without messing up. Once I had the footage, I wrote a little script to explain it all, then got ChatGPT to turn it into something more like a calm, helpful advert.

I fed that into ElevenLabs and picked Brian (he's free and sounds super human) to narrate it.

I did all the remaining launch stuff Product Hunt recommends too like teaser image, first comment, scheduling the post, all that. Then I hit launch.

And boom 🤩 it shot up to 70 upvotes.
I don’t know if it was just luck or timing or better graphics or what, but compared to my first launch it felt surreal. Within minutes I was getting LinkedIn messages from 10 different Indian tech "influencers" offering paid promo. I was still high on the adrenaline of organic growth so I just replied to each of them with an affiliate link and said “feel free to use this if you think it'll perform.” Of course none of them did they want cash upfront and it seems pretty shady so I took a hard pass on the them.

As the day went on, a bunch of makers reached out for comment trades. I didn’t message anyone myself, but I did say yes to every request that came in, and gave them some love in return.

It’s funny, on the day it really feels like being at the top matters. You forget that there’s a launch every single day. But the impact for me was massive. My total downloads almost doubled and I’ve been live for maybe 6 or 8 weeks.

If you’re indie and you’re thinking about launching, honestly:

• Watch the top products

• Reverse engineer their slides

• Make a clean, real demo video

• Use free tools like ElevenLabs and cheap ones like Canva

• Actually schedule and prepare your launch steps
  It doesn’t have to be perfect, but just putting some polish on it made a huge difference.

Ask me anything, happy to share what I learned the hard way.