Product Hunt: How to win Product of the Day?
We won Product of the Day on Product Hunt with our non-official Figma MCP server a month ago. And I want to share with you some thoughts about it and our experience. If you are not aware of Product Hunt, it is a curated platform of the best new products every day. It is a big deal for indie hackers and bootstrappers. But big companies also use this platform in their marketing campaigns.
And there are a lot of myths and beliefs around Product Hunt. I want to bust some of them and confirm the others.
Why did we decide to publish on Product Hunt?
We developed a non-official Figma MCP plugin in November-December 2026. It was a side product of our work. We planned to release it as a Figma plugin. Nothing more. But, unexpectedly and unfortunately for us, this plugin was not approved. Figma moderators decided that it does not follow community guidelines. I tried to get an exact answer to what should be changed to get an approval, but I didn’t succeed with it. I might not be happy about it, but that is ok, that is how business works. Probably, Figma as a company had a different vision on how they want to develop their MCP tools and interaction with AI agents. And we see it by the introduction of the Figma plugin for Claude Code.
But it was unexpected for us at that time. And if our work could not be shared with the community as a Figma plugin, then we needed some other platform to share it with others. Otherwise, what is the point of doing something free and open-source, but no one will know about it? LinkedIn is an obvious choice, but we also wanted to share it with a broader audience without huge efforts. That is why the selection was: Reddit, LinkedIn, Product Hunt, and a presentation at the Context.
Product Hunt: Prelaunch
It is quite easy to launch on Product Hunt. If you have something, then you can easily describe it, prepare a few assets, and record a Loom video. I was so lazy that I recorded a video without sound, a small clip that shows how the plugin works, nothing more. Looking back, I got feedback that it is much better to do it with sound, and I agree with it.
The next task was the selection of a date. I decided not to be very ambitious here. If you select popular dates(Tuesday-Thursday), you might encounter Anthropic or Google products as a competitor. And good luck, have fun in this case, compete with top companies with your small project. Saturdays and Sundays are the least active on Product Hunt. But then the launch loses its main purpose: get the audience. The compromise was the first Friday of the year to get a balance between chances to win and get an audience as big as possible
Warming up
We didn’t do any warming up. There are a lot of articles on how to do it. That you should start writing posts about the future launch. Some people even suggest that you contact other hunters and makers that you plan to launch. And I still get these spam messages about some future launches due to the success of our product. People ask me to support them… I don’t believe that this strategy can bring you anywhere. That is like a wrong KPI. The main goal is to get the audience, but not to get likes. But you should be aware that your competitors will use it.
The day of the Launch
The Product Hunt hides upvotes for the first few hours of the day. You don’t know who the leader is. There are beliefs in the “hunter” communities that this part of the day is the most important. And that you should bring as many people to vote for your product as possible. We didn’t do it, but you should expect that your competitors will do it.
Featured on Product Hunt badge
There is an internal “featured” badge on Product Hunt. It acts as a social proof indicator awarded to products that have been launched, reviewed, and highlighted by the platform's team on the homepage. It is a trust signal for visitors, showcasing that the product is a recognized, high-quality launch. My recommendation here: just make a decent product and prepare a good launch. If you really have something and you can describe it in a few sentences, I am sure that the Product Hunt team will make your product “featured”.
Business around upvotes
Now we are getting to more spicy things. There is not a lot of “open” information about this side. I wasn’t aware of this area before the launch.
Once your product starts to get traction, it becomes “featured, " and it gets many upvotes, then you will definitely get proposals from businessmen and businesswomen who propose to you to help in getting more upvotes. I got more than 20 proposals. My colleagues also get a lot of them. Most of them were from India. For example
I would love to introduce you to my 50k+ LinkedIn, Telegram, Twitter audience! I supported in 2+ years more than 500+ brands for product hunt launch! Rapport, Firecrawl, Convo, Blink, typeless, incredible many were top products of the day etc
or
I usually help founders gain visibility and engagement for their products/ tools.
I can help your product get more visibility with a tailored shoutout. Here’s my offer:$40 Package: ✅ LinkedIn Post, ✅ Telegram Posts, ✅ Discord Posts, ✅ WhatsApp Communities Posts. I’ll also draft the post for you so it’s ready to go :)
or
We have a team of 300 people who upvote your product on Product Hunt so that your product ranks on the top. All upvotes are organic.Not BOTS. Per 100 Upvotes price - 50$
The prices are different: from 20$ to 400$. Accounts are different: from 10 contacts to 50k subscribers. Packages are different. It might be only an advertisement, which is allowed. It might be something in a gray area. Or it can be a violation of rules, when 300 people will upvote your Product Hunt launch. I'm also not sure if it works. I didn’t try. My thoughts are that it works. I reviewed a few products from “portfolio”, and they looked decent. They got a lot of upvotes for their Product Hunt launch, and they have a lot of reactions on “supported” posts. But some of these proposals could be just a scam. And I know for sure that it works for people who suggest you to help. They earn the money on your launch. Otherwise, there will not be so many of them. And if you have a budget for a Product Hunt launch, but you don’t know where to advertise your product, don’t worry: advertising platforms will find you!
Self promotion
After some time, Product Hunt reveals upvotes for all products. And once they did it, we found ourselves in second place. Meanwhile, I get a lot of messages suggesting to help me for the money. And it was an excitement of the second place and fear that our competitors would buy some “packages”. And I made a few posts: on LinkedIn, on Reddit, and in Ukrainian development communities. It is hard to measure an impact, but I think there was an impact. Self-promotion will not win Product of the Day by itself, but it may give you a few extra upvotes.
Final hours
Our Figma community MCP server was in solid second place. The distance to the first place was slowly decreasing. I extrapolated in my mind that till the end of the day, we should get to the first place or at least be very close to it. And I went to sleep.
Whatsup message that woke me up
I shared my LinkedIn profile on the launch. And I expected a lot of spam there. And I got a lot of spam there. But I didn’t expect that someone would find my phone number and would write me. This message woke me up:
Hey man Community Figma MCP server is currently #2 on product hunt If you are targeting product of the day, let me know I can add 60+ organic upvotes
And there was a list of the products that he shared as proof of his work. I will not share them here, as I am not sure if they really used his “promotion” service.
I declined his proposal. I didn’t go to sleep as I refreshed the Product Hunt page, and I was one upvote behind the first place. I refreshed the page a few more times, and finally our product was in first place!
Message from the competitor
Alen T., whose product Clear for Slack was almost the whole day in first place, and then became second, wrote me. He also got the same proposal to get upvotes to move from the second place to the first. And he also got it in Whatsup. And he was much more concerned about where they get our numbers. In our case, both of us rejected this “proposal”. But you can have different competitors. And I am afraid that if there is a lot of spamming around it then many makers and hunters use these “services”. If no one would use it, no one would propose it.
Conclusions
Outcome
We got the Product of the Day. As it is not a commercial project, we don’t have a financial KPI to measure the impact. We started to get a traffic flow from Product Hunt. Now, Figma MCP Server is one of the most popular pages on our website. But these are not huge numbers. The product on the Github achieved 100+ stars, which is not a lot. And it means that actually, not too many people tried it. It means that achieving Product of the Day on Product Hunt can bring you some attention, but do not expect a lot. It is not a Holy Grail that brings you an infinite number of new users. And, in my opinion, Product Hunt's impact is overestimated. There are many groups, many discussions, and many instruments that can help you with the launch. But the impact of the launch, even with the win of Product of the Day, is moderate.
Should you launch your product on Product Hunt?
Yes, you definitely should do it. It gives you some additional attention. You should not spend a lot of effort to get to the first place. I don’t understand a cult around it. As it becomes a strange place. Sometimes, there are brilliants. But day-to-day, you compete with ChatGPT wrappers. Even our product is kind of a ChatGPT helper. And you may get a product from billion company on the same day with zero chances to win. The audience will blindly vote for it. And also, you may get an unfair competitor that will use “packages” to promote their product. And if they have enough money and zero moral principles, you have no chances as well.
Promote your products on Product Hunt, but avoid spending a lot of effort to avoid possible disappointment.