
We've launched on Product Hunt three times now, generating a significant portion of our user base. In our experience, it's a great way to gain traction before fleshing out a sales or marketing process, especially if you manage to grab enough upvotes. Here’s some quick no-BS tips that we picked up along the way to get your launch up the leaderboard:

## Timing

There isn't an objectively best time to post, but you want to aim for some time after midnight PST, since that's when the daily leaderboard resets. If you're based in the east coast and would like to avoid staying up to 3 AM, Product Hunt allows you to schedule posts. One big caveat to watch out for is that Product Hunt also takes into account [upvotes over time](https://twitter.com/rrhoover/status/1241093749402292225), so you may want to modify your launch time depending on when you expect the most upvotes to roll in.

## Presentation

When creating visual material to attach to your post, focus on creating mock-ups that show off what it’s like to actually use your product. We ordered our 3 mock-ups to tell a story:

1. What our customer would see normally. 
2. How our customer would start using our product. 
3. What our customer’s customers would see. 

For example, a social network app launch could have mock-ups like so:

1. Scrolling down the feed. 
2. Interacting with a post (e.g. “liking” it and writing a comment). 
3. Private messaging someone (or anything, really). 

If you’re able to, make GIFs to show off the flow! All 3 of our mock-ups are GIFs that we made using Figma, but you can also screen record. Don’t forget to make your icon a GIF, too. 

## Advocates

Find some people who can advocate for your product! You can share a private draft of your post and have them comment a testimonial before you publish your post. That way, you’ll have positive sentiment as soon as the post goes live. 

If possible, find reputable advocates. On top of asking friends/family for upvotes, don’t be afraid to ask your investors, current customers, and fellow founders for testimonials (return the favor, if possible). Having some recognizable names definitely boosts street cred! We were lucky to have Initialized Capital's Garry Tan "hunt" *and promote* our launches, which was instrumental in driving a significant amount of traffic to our launch. 

## Launch again... and again

Didn’t get #1 this time? You can launch again when you release a major feature! Our most recent launch is actually our third launch — we [originally launched our core product 10 months ago](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/cohere). Examples of other companies relaunching include [Ramp ($1.6B valuation) launching 3 times](https://www.producthunt.com/@eglyman/made) and [Stripe launching even more frequently!](https://www.producthunt.com/@edwinwee/made) It’s a great way to get more eyeballs on major features you’ve shipped, especially when potential customers are waiting on those specific features. 

Thanks for reading, and we hope this helps! For further reading, you can check out Product Hunt's own [Pro Tips](https://www.producthunt.com/protips?ref=meta_nav) page.

\- The Cohere team

How we took the top 3 spot on Product Hunt multiple times and acquired hundreds of users with no marketing or sales budget.

Launching on Product Hunt — Climbing the Leaderboard

As the pandemic impacts people and businesses all over the world, it’s been a challenging year for all of us, but especially for teams in customer-facing roles. Support teams have borne the brunt of unexpected surges in support volume and frustrated customers. For teams facing the responsibility of onboarding and retaining customers, the necessity of going remote has added complexity and friction. And founders are greeted with a new challenge — staying close to users while keeping feedback loops tight.

Six months ago, we built Cohere to make engaging with your users feel like you’re standing right beside them. Today, Cohere is being used by teams ranging from founders looking for their first few customers to large enterprises aiming to seamlessly solve customer issues. Across the board, we’ve heard that Cohere lightens the load, helps spot issues early, saves deals, and leaves end customers more satisfied. For their customers, help is only a call or message away, with no remote desktop software to download or meetings to schedule. Cohere helps teams stay connected, calm, and focused on what matters — helping their customers be successful.

We’re bringing together everything that’s required for customer success. Cohere plugs into your existing stack, integrating into Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce, Slack and more. Alongside our core product, we’re excited to announce Cohere Replay, which lets you go back in time to understand issues by viewing customer sessions retroactively. We’ve also invested heavily into security — apart from a suite of features designed to protect end user privacy, we also recently obtained our SOC 2 certification, which is unheard of for companies our age.

> "Our customers love Cohere because it requires no setup on their end. They are always really impressed when I say, "Yeah I can see what you’re doing, now go ahead and click that." — We have a lot of customers who are not technically savvy, and Cohere is a huge win to help support that customer segment." — Natalie Mercuri, Manager of Customer Support at Canix, winner of TechCrunch Disrupt 2020’s Startup Battlefield.

We are excited to announce our $3.1M seed round led by Initialized Capital, joined by Y Combinator, BoxGroup, Soma Capital, Shrug Capital, Chapter One, and a number of phenomenal entrepreneurs and operators, including Zach Perret, Elad Gil, Naval Ravikant, Eric Wu, Prasanna Sankaranarayanan, Tina Bhatnagar, Eric Glyman, Jack Altman, Todd Goldberg, Rahul Vohra, Zach Frankel, Karim Atiyeh, Vivek Sodera, Sam Blond, Zach Abrams, Dan Romero, Varun Srinivasan, Athena Kan, Mircea Pașoi, Nick Candito, Shrav Mehta, Calvin Lee, and Oscar Hong.

> "One of the keys to customer success is making sure your users are getting the full value out of your product. The world has gone remote, which makes customer training and support more important than ever, and more difficult. We were blown away by Cohere’s novel technical approach - it really gives companies a seamless collaboration experience with their customers that wows when you see it for yourself." — Garry Tan, founder and Managing Partner at Initialized Capital.

This round of funding will help us accelerate our product development, build the team, and continue to bring value to our customers. And we are just getting started. If our story resonates with you, please reach out at hello@cohere.so. We’d love to have you join us.

Thanks for following along, Yunyu, Rahul, and Jason

Today we’re unveiling Cohere and announcing our $3.1m seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, BoxGroup, Soma Capital, Shrug Capital, and Chapter One.