How to Win on Uneed and Other Product Launch Platforms

Launching a new product is an exciting moment. After all the work, time, and effort you put into it, it’s finally time to show it to the world.

There are many ways to execute your product launch strategy. One key element of your strategy can be product discovery platforms. These platforms are specifically designed to showcase new products, tools, or services to a community of early adopters and tech enthusiasts.

Product Hunt has been the leader in this space for quite some time. Still, emerging platforms like Microlaunch and BetaList are gaining traction and providing new opportunities for indie developers and small startups to show their work.

Icanpreneur was recently launched on one of these emerging platforms—Uneed.best. In this article, we will share our experience with the platform as well as tips and tricks for having a successful launch. Don’t miss the special tips from the platform's founder at the end of the article.

Preparation and Prerequisites

Preparation starts long before you click the “Add your product” button on the platform. Many prerequisites need to be in place before you are ready to submit your product.

1. Market Research

The starting point is understanding your target audience. This is critically important not only for the purpose of the product launch but also for building a valuable product.

The best way to gain strong customer insights is to conduct market research using customer interviews. Such interviews will provide detailed insights about:

• When and how people experience the problem that you plan to solve with your product?
• How and where are they looking for solutions for the customer problem?
• What criteria do they use to pick a solution?

This context will help you not only to build a campaign that resonates with your audience but to build a product that they cannot afford not to use.

2. Product Development

Before you launch the product, you have to build the product itself. Building a product is rarely successful behind closed doors. Keeping in touch with potential customers and insiders who can experience a prototype or specific parts of your product can increase your learning rate and provide quick customer feedback before you have invested too much in the wrong direction.

Acquiring an early group of insiders and adopters of your product is the first step in building a community and is a prerequisite for a successful product launch.

3. Pre-launch Strategy

Once you have the MVP ready and a good understanding of your target audience, it’s time to set the stage for your launch.

Go through the list of fields and artifacts you need to provide for the product launch platform and make sure you nail each one.

From the short description to the product images, every detail is important to increasing engagement and conversion to your website or product.

Consider how your product will be shown in different contexts:

• How does it look on the list page? What can be helpful to differentiate it from all other products?
• What’s the most important thing you want to communicate on your detail product page - what are the points that will make a visitor want to see your product?

It’s also important to spend some time on the platform to understand how others are using it. This will help you understand the norms and the etiquette on the platform but can also hint you to how your product can stand out from the crowd.

Most platforms like Uneed.best give incentives for people to build the habit of visiting the platform and voting for products. This creates a steady stream of product votes every day. Uneed will give you 2x voting points after five consecutive days of voting, so don’t miss this opportunity to take an extra vote.

To maximize your upvotes, don’t rely entirely on votes from the platform. It’s important to activate other channels as well like:

• Insiders and early adopters
• Communities in Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter that are relevant to your target audience

To prepare for the launch day, get the outreach for each of these groups done upfront and ready to be sent at the start of the day. This will maximize the votes you get and will create strong momentum. Each of the groups might have different motivations to support you, so it’s important to adapt the outreach strategy.

Launch Strategy: Choosing the Right Approach

4. Soft Launch vs Hard Launch

Deciding between a soft and a hard launch will significantly influence your go-to-market strategy.

A hard launch is making the product generally available to all potential customers. Everybody is free to come try and buy the product as intended by the sales process you have designed.

A soft launch is opening the product a selected group of people, through a private beta, preview versions, or some other way.

Both approaches can be a viable path for your product launch so make sure you are making a deliberate decision on this one.

5. Visuals and Messaging

Visuals can additionally make your communication more engaging and appealing. Different product launch platforms offer different options for enriching your product page.

Uneed allows both videos and images from the product to be used. Make sure you have planned enough time for those marketing collaterals as they can take significant time, especially the video production.

Post-Launch: Sustaining Momentum

6. Tracking Success Metrics

Depending on the goals of your campaign, you might have different success metrics. If you aim to increase your brand awareness, new websites visitors and impressions on your Uneed page can be good candidates to measure the success of your campaign. If your goal is to drive paying customers, number of new subscribers coming from Uneed is a great metric to track.

To be able to track any of these metrics, you need to add a tracking code to the call to action link that you set in the platform. This usually represents different query parameters that you add to your regular URL that will help you identify traffic coming from Uneed to your URL in Google Analytics and other analytics platforms.

7. Engaging Customers

Once people start coming to your product, make sure you engage with them and create a steady stream of feedback from them. Chances are that there will be gaps between the personas you have defined and the actual profile, pain points, and behaviors of your customers.

Understanding and addressing those gaps will help you keep the momentum going and increase your traction.

8. Turning Launch Success into Long-Term Growth

Organizing a successful big splash launch is great but will have meaningful impact for your product only if you are able to capitalize on this win.

Designing viral feedback loops into the product experience will convert the initial amount of users into a steady stream of new customers coming to your product.

There are many examples for such high-virality features:

• Dropbox gives free space for every new user you refer and signs up
• Gmail launched as an invite-only service and each user had a limited amount of invites they could send, creating demand and the perception of scarcity
• Icanpreneur give entrepreneurs and product leaders the opportunity to invite others to contribute to their startup increasing the value of the platform and adding more people to the customer base.

Lessons Learned: Advice for Entrepreneurs

9. Challenges Faced

Teaser Campaign

Activating users to vote within the day of the campaign can be challenging. Many people didn’t see the message right away and voted a few days later. This is also beneficial for winning the week or month award, but can hinder your winner of the day goal. Sending small teasers and inviting people to subscribe for your launch can increase the engagement level.

Launch Date

Our product was initially scheduled for launch during the weekend. Depending on your target audience, weekends might be more challenging to engage your audience. On the hand, there are fewer competitors so this might be an option to standout.

Get to the Top from the First Minute

Getting the first place from the start can help you get more of the votes of the random visitors of the platform who are browsing through the daily launches. More impressions means higher chance of getting an upvote. If possible set the stage for strong start. The day on Uneed starts at 8AM UTC and getting several votes from the first minute can make a big difference.

10. Tips for New Entrepreneurs from the Founder of Uneed

This guide won’t be complete without a few tips from the best expert on the Uneed platform - its founder Thomas Sanlis. Here are a few questions that Thomas provided specifically for our blog.

In your experience, what is the single factor that sets successful product launches apart from others on Uneed.best?

Thomas: Uneed, as a launch platform, is still pretty new. Add to this the fact that the number of products launched each day is limited, and you have all the ingredients needed to make a great launch quite easily.

The necessary ingredient for a successful launch is neither secret nor complicated: it's all about talking about it.

You don't need a big audience: a few posts on social networks and/or a few emails to your contacts are all it takes to win a few upvotes. Also, if your product is of interest to the most active members of our community, you've hit the jackpot: the most active get a vote multiplier of up to x5!

What are the most common mistakes you see entrepreneurs make when launching products on Uneed.best, and how can they avoid them?

Thomas: The two most common mistakes are not talking about the launch, or talking about it too late in the day.

Indeed, if you wait too long, you'll remain at the bottom of the page for most of the day. In the first hour after launch, it's very easy to climb the podium and get maximum visibility!

Can you share a success story of a product launch on Uneed.best that particularly impressed you, and what made it stand out?

Thomas: The launch of TechIns8, which is currently in the 2nd position in our 2025 yearly leaderboard, was particularly impressive. Lucien, its creator, built up the pressure by talking about it the days before, then talked about the launch A LOT on the D day, and managed to get an extremely high number of upvotes that way!

Wrap Up: Is It Worth It?

Using a product launch platform as part of a go-to-market strategy can be extremely beneficial in many aspects:

• Improves the SEO of your domain. You get backlinks from high-quality domain that improves your ranking and authority score.
• Unlocks new source of traffic to your page. Winning a product category can feature your product on a highly visible article that will send visitors back to your website. Icanpreneur for example is part of the top products for idea validation and research.
• Increased visibility and brand awareness. Product launch platforms are often used by editors and bloggers for interesting products to feature. Being the product of the day is a sure way to get their attention.
• Boosts credibility and trustworthiness. One of the hardest things for a new product is to gain the trust of the first customers. Winning the votes of your audience is a sure way to amplify and capitalize on the trust of your first early adopters.