How to Make a Product Hunt Launch Video (2026 Guide)
A good Product Hunt launch video is 30–60 seconds, landscape, and shows your real product doing real work within the first ten seconds. Here is how to plan, script, record and edit one, step by step.
What a Product Hunt launch video actually has to do
On launch day, most people meet your product in a list. They see a name, a tagline and a thumbnail, click through, and give your page a few seconds. The video sits in your gallery, and its job is narrow: make it obvious what the product is, who it is for and why it is better, before the visitor scrolls on to the comments or the next launch.
That means a Product Hunt launch video is not a brand film and not a full tutorial. It is closer to a trailer. It has to answer three questions fast:
- What is it? One sentence the viewer could repeat to a colleague.
- Does it really work? Real screens, not illustrations or mock-ups.
- What do I do now? Your name and URL, clearly, at the end.
The same video will be shared on X, LinkedIn and in newsletters on launch day, so it also needs to make sense without the Product Hunt page around it.
Length and format
Aim for 30–60 seconds. Under 30 seconds and you rarely have time to show the product working; over 60 and you lose most viewers before the end. Around 45 seconds is a comfortable target for most SaaS products, AI tools and developer tools.
Use 16:9 landscape for the gallery. Product Hunt has historically accepted a YouTube link for the gallery video, so upload the finished file to YouTube (unlisted is fine) and check the current submission form for exactly what it accepts. Make separate 9:16 or 4:5 cuts for launch-day posts on social; our launch video length by platform guide lists the usual choices.
Export at 1080p. Most viewers will watch on a laptop or phone, so 1080p is sharp enough, and it uploads quickly when you are fixing something at the last minute.
A beat-by-beat structure that works
This seven-beat structure suits most launches. It is the same one used in our Product Hunt launch video template.
| Beat | Time | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Hook | 0–4s | One line naming the problem, in your customer's words |
| Reveal | 4–7s | Logo and tagline |
| Demo 1 | 7–15s | The first meaningful action in the product |
| Demo 2 | 15–26s | The core job the product does |
| Demo 3 | 26–34s | The result or output |
| Features | 34–40s | Four to six short labels for everything else |
| Close | 40–45s | Name, URL, "live on Product Hunt today" |
The hook and the close are the parts people remember. The three demo beats are the parts that convince. If you need to cut time, trim the demo beats a little each rather than dropping the hook or the close.
Writing the script
Write the script before you record anything. It decides which screens you need, and it is far cheaper to change a sentence than to re-record a flow.
- Start from the tagline. Your Product Hunt tagline and your video's reveal line should be the same words. The Product Hunt tagline generator can help you shortlist options.
- Write the hook three ways. Try a problem ("Release notes take longer than the release"), a question ("Still writing release notes by hand?") and an outcome ("Release notes that write themselves"). Read them aloud and keep the one that sounds most like your customers.
- One idea per sentence. Each sentence should match one scene.
- Budget the words. A relaxed voiceover usually lands somewhere around 130–160 words a minute, so a 45-second video holds roughly 100–120 words. If your draft is longer, cut, don't speed up.
Our launch video script template has copy-paste 30, 60 and 90-second scripts, and the launch video script generator drafts one from your product description.
Recording footage that looks good
Your product footage is the most persuasive part of the video, and it is easy to make it look better with a little preparation:
- Use a demo account with believable data. Empty states and "test test" entries undermine everything else. Fill it with realistic, fictional content.
- Set a clean window size. A consistent browser size (for example 1440×900 or 1920×1080) with the bookmarks bar hidden and no other extensions visible.
- Turn off notifications and close anything personal.
- Record each flow separately. Short clips are easier to trim, reorder and retime than one long take.
- Move the mouse slowly and pause before each click. You can always speed footage up; you cannot slow down a frantic cursor.
Any screen recorder will do: QuickTime, OBS, Loom, Screen Studio or Cap all produce usable footage. Our guide to turning a screen recording into a launch film goes into more detail.
Editing: motion, focus and pacing
Raw screen recordings are hard to follow at video size. Most of the editing work is about directing attention:
- Zoom into the region that matters. A full browser window shown at phone size is unreadable. Zoom so the button, field or result fills most of the frame.
- Highlight the action. A ring, spotlight or underline shows the viewer where to look.
- Smooth the cursor. Jittery cursor movement looks unpolished; a smoothed path with visible clicks reads as intentional.
- Keep scenes short. Three to eight seconds per scene is typical. Long scenes are fine only when something is visibly happening.
- Use a consistent look. One typeface pairing, your brand colours, and the same transition style throughout.
Sound, voiceover and captions
Assume a large share of viewers will watch muted, especially from social feeds. Every scene should carry a short on-screen headline that tells the story without audio, and you should burn captions in for the voiceover.
For people who do turn the sound on, a clear voiceover and a modest music bed make a big difference. Keep music lower than the voice (ducking it automatically under speech is ideal), and normalise loudness so the video is not jarringly loud or quiet next to other posts. If you are not comfortable recording your own voice, an AI voiceover is a reasonable option; see AI voiceover for product videos.
Common mistakes to avoid
- A long logo intro. Nobody on Product Hunt is waiting to see your logo animate. Two or three seconds at most.
- Showing every feature. Three demo beats plus a feature list is plenty. Depth belongs on your website.
- Illustrations instead of the product. Abstract animation tells people you might not have a product yet.
- Unreadable UI. If you can't read it on your phone, zoom in.
- No clear ending. End on your name and URL, held long enough to read.
- Finishing it the night before. Leave time to watch it on a phone, muted, and fix what you notice.
For the wider launch-day plan, see the Product Hunt launch checklist.
Making it faster with an AI launch video tool
You can build all of this in a general video editor. It just takes time, particularly the zooms, cursor paths and captions. Cadenzova Spotlight was built for exactly this video: paste your website URL, upload your screenshots and screen recordings, and an AI director studies the footage, writes the story and plans a first cut. You then edit every scene, voice and caption yourself before exporting in 16:9 for the gallery and 9:16 or 4:5 for social.
The free plan lets you build the whole video and export a watermarked preview; a one-off Launch Pass unlocks the 1080p, watermark-free export. Details are on the pricing page, and the Product Hunt launch video page shows how it fits a launch.