How to write a tagline and description for a launch listing

The launch checklist gives the short rule: say what it does and who it’s for, in plain words. Product Hunt’s guide puts it as “make it clear before you make it clever”, asks makers to say exactly what the product does and to avoid hype like “the best” or “#1” (Product Hunt’s launch guide).

A pattern that works for most products is job, then audience, then the one thing that sets it apart:

• Before: “Ledgerleaf: the future of freelance finance”
• After: “Ledgerleaf: invoice tracking for freelance designers”
• Before: “Pinecrate: supercharge your team’s workflow with AI”
• After: “Pinecrate: turns support emails into a weekly bug list”
• Before: “Tidewatch: monitoring, reimagined”
• After: “Tidewatch: uptime alerts for side projects, by SMS”

Three checks before you settle on one:

1. The swap test. Put a competitor’s name in front of your tagline. If it still fits, it says nothing about your product.
2. The stranger test. Show the line to someone outside your field for five seconds, then ask what the product does. Their answer is what your tagline actually says.
3. The cut test. Chop it at 40 characters. Listings and search results truncate, so the job should survive the cut. “Invoice tracking for freelance designers” keeps its meaning. “The simple, modern, all-in-one way to track your invoices” loses it.

Words to cut on sight: revolutionary, seamless, effortless, next-generation, all-in-one, powerful, supercharge. They take up characters and tell the reader nothing they can check.

Each platform has its own lengths and title rules. As of November 2026:

• Product Hunt. Tagline up to 60 characters, description up to 500, and a maker comment of up to 5,000 characters that is pinned at the top of the discussion (source).
• Hacker News. A Show HN title has to begin with “Show HN” (Show HN guidelines). The site guidelines ask you not to make titles stand out with uppercase or exclamation points, or by saying how great something is (HN guidelines). “Show HN: Tidewatch – uptime alerts for side projects, by SMS” fits. “Show HN: The BEST uptime monitor!” doesn’t.
• Everywhere else. Read the submit form. Limits differ from board to board, and a tagline cut off mid-word looks careless.

Write one tagline at the shortest limit you’ll meet, then a longer variant for places with more room. Keep the first few words identical so people recognise the product from one place to the next.

Product Hunt’s advice for the description is to lead with the value, then the features that deliver it (source). In practice that is three or four sentences:

1. What the reader gets, stated as a result.
2. How it works, in one sentence with a concrete detail.
3. What it works with, or who it’s built for.
4. What it costs, or how to try it.

Before:

“Ledgerleaf is a powerful, intuitive platform that leverages automation to help freelancers take control of their finances like never before. Packed with features, it’s the only tool you’ll ever need.”

After:

“Ledgerleaf shows which invoices are unpaid and how late they are. Forward an invoice PDF to your Ledgerleaf address and it reads the client, amount and due date. It sends reminder emails you approve first. Works with any invoicing tool that exports PDF. Free for five clients, then a flat monthly price.”

The second version has nothing the reader must take on trust. Every sentence can be checked by trying the product. It also says what the product is for narrowly enough that the wrong reader moves on, which saves you a confused sign-up.

• Use numbers only when they are true and you can show them.
• Name the alternative people use today if it helps: “instead of a spreadsheet”.
• State one limit honestly: “Mac only for now”, “no team accounts yet”. It builds more trust than a feature list.
• Write full sentences. A string of keywords reads as spam.

On boards with comments, the maker usually posts first. Product Hunt’s guide says to write like a person and not a press release, that humble and helpful beats hype, and to ask for feedback, never for upvotes. It notes that “Please upvote!” breaks its rules (source). Hacker News asks that you have worked on the project yourself and be around to discuss it (source).

A structure that works in most places:

1. Who you are, in one line.
2. The problem, as you met it.
3. What the product does today, and what it doesn’t do yet.
4. How to try it, and what it costs.
5. One specific question.

Weak:

“Hi everyone! We’re super excited to finally share Pinecrate with the world! It’s been an amazing journey. Please check it out and show us some love!”

Better:

“I’m a solo developer and I handle support for my own app. Bug reports arrive mixed in with billing questions, and I kept losing them. Pinecrate reads a support inbox and produces a weekly list of distinct bugs with the emails that reported each one. It works with Gmail and Fastmail today; there’s no Outlook support yet. The first inbox is free. If you run support for a small product: how do you track which bugs customers report most?”

The question at the end should be one you want answered. People reply to a real question, and the answers are useful whether or not they try the product.

Your tagline and description end up in search results in two ways: through the listing pages that carry them, and through your own site if you reuse them in your meta tags.

Google says snippets are created automatically from page content, and that it may use the page’s meta description when that gives a more accurate description than the content does. There is no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the snippet is truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width (Google on snippets). For the title line, Google draws on the <title> element, the main visual title, headings, og:title and other prominent text (Google on title links).

What that means for your writing:

• Front-load. Since snippets are cut to fit, the first sentence of your description should make sense alone.
• Don’t stuff keywords. Google says meta descriptions made of long strings of keywords are less likely to be shown, and tells site owners to avoid keyword stuffing in titles.
• Vary the long description between sites. Keep the tagline constant, but write the longer text fresh for each listing where you can. Google asks for unique descriptions per page on your own site; the same paragraph on thirty listing pages gives none of them a reason to be shown.
• Match your own page. Use the tagline, or a close variant, in your homepage <title>, og:title and main heading, so the listing and the page it links to say the same thing.

To see what a listing site does with your text, run a live listing page through the meta tag checker and look at its title and description. Do the same for your homepage. The guide on landing page meta tags covers your own tags in detail.

Put everything in one file you can paste from, and update it when the wording changes:

• Product name, spelled and capitalised one way.
• Tagline at the shortest limit, and a longer variant.
• Short description, and a version of a few paragraphs.
• First comment, with the question adapted for each community.
• Alt text for each screenshot (see listing visuals).
• The exact URL you want every listing to link to.

After a launch, compare the words in this file with the words people used in comments and emails. Where they differ, theirs are usually the better tagline.