The Product Hunt launch video, done properly

What the video is actually for

A Product Hunt visitor gives your listing seconds, not minutes. They arrive from a ranked list of other launches, skim the tagline, and look at the first thing in your gallery. That first slot is the whole game: it either makes the product legible fast enough to earn a scroll through the rest, or the back button fires. A launch film exists to win that moment, and everything about how it should be made follows from it.

It follows, first, that the film must work silent. Autoplay is muted everywhere your launch will be seen, Product Hunt included, so the argument has to be carried by on-screen words and captions, with the voice-over as a bonus for the minority who unmute. It follows, second, that the film must be short: sixty seconds is the ceiling, and the first five carry most of the value, because that is all a skimmer commits before deciding.

The 60-second structure for a launch listing

The six-beat launch structure applies, compressed toward the front. A Product Hunt viewer differs from a social-feed viewer in one useful way: they chose to look at new products today, so you can skip the pattern-interrupt tricks and open with the product itself.

1. 01

   Name and promise, 0-5 seconds

   Product name, logo, and the one-line promise as on-screen type. The viewer should be able to repeat what your product is after five seconds, because that may be all you get.

2. 02

   The problem, 5-15 seconds

   One scene on the pain, phrased in the viewer's words rather than your category's jargon. Skimmers self-select here: the right viewer leans in, the wrong one leaves cheaply.

3. 03

   Three capability beats, 15-40 seconds

   One idea per scene, one line of copy per idea, product evidence behind each. Resist the fourth feature; the listing's text below the gallery can carry the rest.

4. 04

   Proof or differentiator, 40-50 seconds

   The thing a competitor listing cannot say: the metric, the integration, the approach. On Product Hunt your film sits one click from every alternative, so this beat earns its slot.

5. 05

   End card, 50-60 seconds

   Logo, URL, and the ask. On launch day the ask is the visit; the upvote takes care of itself if the product lands.

Specs that matter on launch day

• 16:9 landscape for the gallery slot. Vertical film belongs on shorts feeds, not a desktop-first gallery. Full dimensions per platform are in the specs guide.
• Captions burned or frame-synced, because the muted-autoplay rule is absolute. If the words are not on screen, they were not said.
• Real text, not generated pixels. Your name, tagline, and URL will be read at small sizes by people deciding quickly; smeared type in the first five seconds reads as a smeared product.
• Loudness mastered for feeds, around -14 LUFS, so the unmuting minority is not blasted.
• A poster-worthy first frame. Some surfaces show the frame before play; it should work as a still.

One film, four launch surfaces

The economics of a launch film only work if it launders across the whole week. The same 16:9 master takes the Product Hunt gallery, the launch post on X, the LinkedIn announcement, and the homepage hero; a 9:16 cut of the same project covers vertical feeds. This is why supaintro renders both orientations from one project: the film is composed for each, not cropped into the second one.

Sequence matters less than founders fear, but the safe order is: film live on your site first, then the Product Hunt listing with the film in slot one, then the social posts pointing at the listing while it can still climb.