Product launch examples worth copying
The launch formats that keep working for software: Product Hunt, Show HN, launch weeks and the changelog post, plus how to save launches.
TLDR
- A launch is a sequence, not a page: the teaser, the launch day post, the email, the follow-up. Save all of it, in order.
- Product Hunt is still a good day of attention for tools with a clear, visual “aha”.
- Show HN rewards plain honesty and a working demo, and punishes marketing copy.
- Launch weeks (one ship a day for five days) work if you actually have five things.
- The humble changelog post is underrated. It’s the one people find again later.
Product Hunt
A day on the front page, a lot of eyes from other makers, and a badge for your site. It works best when the product is easy to get in one screenshot and one sentence.
I’ve been involved in three “Top 5 Product of the Day” launches (GraphCMS and Build Your DXP among them), and wrote up what went into them in launching developer tools on Product Hunt. The short version: launch day is mostly replying to comments. The weeks before it, lining up your community, your assets and your first comment, take way more effort.
What to save from a good one: the gallery images (in order), the tagline, the maker’s first comment, and the page it linked to.
Show HN
A post on Hacker News starting with “Show HN:”, linking to something people can try right now. The best ones are written by the person who built it, say plainly what it does and what it doesn’t, and answer every comment.
What gets punished: landing pages with no way to try the thing, anything that reads like marketing, and not showing up in the comments. What to save: the post title (short, specific, no adjectives) and how the maker replied to criticism.
Launch weeks
Popularised by developer tools like Supabase: five days, one launch a day, each with a post, a video and a social push, building to something bigger at the end.
It works because five announcements get five chances at attention instead of one. It fails when day three is a “we updated our docs” post dressed up as news. Only do it if you have five real things.
What to save: the landing page for the week (they usually have one), the order of the days, and how each day’s post opened.
The changelog post
Nobody tweets about a changelog post. But a clear “here’s what shipped, here’s a screenshot, here’s why” post is the one customers find again six months later, and the one sales sends round. A launch without one is a launch that disappears once the tweets scroll away.
Build a launch swipe file
Launches are time-limited. The launch page gets replaced, the Product Hunt page stops being the homepage, the teaser tweet sinks. So when you see a good one, save it that week:
- The launch page, as a full-page snapshot, before it changes.
- The announcement email, forwarded in.
- The posts, in the order they went out.
- Why you saved it, in a note. “The day-4 video was great” is more useful than a link.
In Savepad that’s a sequence: one save holding the whole launch in order, laid out on a timeline, with the emails forwarded straight in. Put it in your swipe file, next to the landing page examples and the headline examples you’ll need for your own launch page.
Before you post anything, paste your launch link into a DM to yourself and check how it unfurls. A broken share image on launch day is a very specific kind of pain.