How to launch a Product on Peerlist.io launchpad?

What is Peerlist?

Peerlist is an emerging alternative to Product Hunt.

It is still modest in terms of traffic size:

However, Peerlist is much more friendly to early-stage startups than Product Hunt:

• Product Hunt is featuring only 30 products per day, and projects that aren’t featured aren’t getting any exposure
• Launching on Peerlist is less of a rush than Product Hunt, as there is a whole week to collect support. That makes it more comfortable for solo-founders.
• Peelist gives the same exposure to all projects. All submitted projects get featured, and ranking is randomised for the first 2 days of the week.
• You actually get feedback on Peerlist and not only comments like “Congratulations on the launch” or other AI comments, which are now the norm on Product Hunt.
• You have the option to submit a new project to Peerlist launchpad every week. This gives you more freedom to experiment with micro-tools and pivots than Product Hunt’s 6-month cold-down.

How to prepare a Peerlist launch

Peerlist launches always start on Monday so I advise preparing your launch on Friday at the latest. Launch assets you need to prepare are realy similar to Product Hunt:

• Project name (max 45 characters)
• Tagline (max 60 characters)
• Category (up to 3)
• Tech you used (up to 10)
• Logo (500px x 500px • Max 15mb.)
• 1 to 4 screenshot (1200 x 630px • Up to 4 images. • Max 15mb each.)
• Project description (up to 5k characters)

Now, if you want to put every chance on your side, you need to prepare an audience before launching. Peerlist ranking is based on the number of upvotes and comments on your launch. However, not all upvotes are equal. Peerlist is boosting the value of users based on their activity streak:

• 14-day streak doubles the upvote value
• A 100-day streak triple the upvote value

So you want to connect with active Peerlist users before your launch. Luckily, it is realy easy to do with Apify and Phantombuster.

Get relevant leads with Apify

Apify offers a free plan that should have enough credit to implement the workflow described below. My colleague wrote a full review of Apify if you want to learn more about it.

Find relevant Peerlist launches

First of all, you want to find Peerlist launches that are similar to your product.

For example, my latest launch was an N8N template, so I wanted to find other launches built with N8N. The easiest way to do so is to use a Google search for “site:peerlist.io N8N”

If you want to scrape results of multiple Google searches, you can use the Apify Google search scraper. I strongly recommend you to check the list of launches returned by Google. Keyword search isn’t a 100% accurate process, so you might get some irrelevant products.

Get a list of upvoters

Now you can get a list of people who upvoted those launches. To do so, you will need this Apify actor.

List all the launches you are interested in and make sure to toggle to the option “Scrape Profile” :

Once you are done with the setup, click “Save & Run”

Wait a few minutes and you will get a full list of Peerlist users who upvoted those launches, with information like their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.

You can download the 2 results files “List of Upvoter” & “List of profile” as csv

For the next step, you will need to upload those CSVs into a Google spreadsheet. You can easily match the data from both files using a vlookup function on the Peerlist profile URL.

Connect with Phantombuster

By now, you should have a list of Peerlist users who might be interested in your launch. It is time to connect with them.

I would advise you to start connecting with this audience at least 2 weeks before your plan launch date, as the outreach process is quite slow. For example, on LinkedIn, you cannot send more 100 connection requests per week.

If you want to run the outreach on both Twitter and LinkedIn you will need a paid phantombuster account. The starter plan at €63 should be enough.

LinkedIn outreach

LinkedIn outreach will be easy to do with a Phantombuster account. Simply set up the linkedin outreach flow

On the first setup page paste the URL of the Google Sheet you prepared with Apify. You need to make sure that the spreadsheet is accessible to anybody with the link

You also need to provide the name of the column containing the LinkedIn URL.

Pro tip: You don’t have to remove contacts without a LinkedIn profile from your file; Phantombuster will ignore those.

For the connect to LinkedIn step, simply use the Phantombuster Chrome extension, or check out this video to add your cookies manually.

On the next setup step, I recommend leaving the LinkedIn invitation message empty. If you don’t have a Sales Navigator subscription, you are limited to only 5 personalised invitations per month, which would be far too slow to build an audience.

On the follow-up stage, leave the check box empty at first:

This will allow you to start the automation before your launch and just send connection requisitions to slowly connect with other Peerlist users.

On the week when your Peerlist project is live, you can revisit this setting and check the box to add a follow-up message. This will make you send a follow-up message to all people who accepted your contact request.

Pro tip: Also plan some LinkedIn posts about your Peerlist launch. It is a great way to be visible to people you added to your network. I recommend planning at least a post on Monday when the launch starts and Wednesday when the ranking is revealed.

About the follow-up message, I used the following template:

“Commented” is a dynamic tag with the name of the project the person upvoted.

Once your automation is running, Phantombuster will provide you with a nice dashboard to monitor your results:

Pro tip: Plan a second follow-up message to ask for feedback. Peerlist isn’t only about upvotes. It is a great community to collect feedback about your product.

Twitter outreach

A lot of Peerlist users are not active on LinkedIn. So it is a good idea to hedge your bet and connect with people on Twitter, too.

The main workflow to connect people over Twitter is to follow them and hope they will follow you back.

To do so, you can simply use the Twitter auto follow Phantom

Like with LinkedIn, it is good to start your outreach early. You can follow max 80 people per day, and I recommend following only 40 to keep your account safe.

Once the launch is live, you can use the Twitter message sender to notify people about your launch.

While your launch is live, post on Twitter often. It isn’t a problem to post twice a day about your launch.

Pro tip: use hashtag. #ProductHunt is a nice one to use, as you can present Peerlist as an alternative to ProductHunt.