Here's what we learned from Product Hunt 🚀
On Monday we launched on Product Hunt for the second time and decided to write up a quick report to provide some insight into our experience.
Our team decided that the Product Hunt launch wouldn't be a make it or break it type of ordeal (compared to some of the features we have to work on) so we didn't devote much of our time to it. This means we didn't hype it up pre-launch and simply just went with the flow until launch day.
On Sunday we quickly prototyped the post content including the video, screenshots, and text. The three of us reviewed it and deemed it good enough for a re-launch.
I scheduled the post to go live at 12:30 AM PST and went to bed, I woke up at around 9 AM PST to find that we had a measly 2 upvotes while having been launched for over 8 hours 😡
I was motivated to at least make this launch worth the effort of creating the post so I:
- Immediately drafted an email to let our userbase know that today was launch day on PH!
- Reached out to our promotion partners on Instagram and let them know we were on PH today
- Sent out an update to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin.
And we waited....
The upvotes started coming in and we were slowly building up momentum, at around 40 upvotes we got featured on the homepage!!
We rode it out and we currently stand at around 98 upvotes (2 days later).
We got around 450 clicks on our link and a couple of new users but nothing major.
Here's the link to the PH launch
We're currently working on Android and Web clients for Stock Alarm so we hope our next launch will be a little more exciting.
Any thoughts?
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Thanks for the write up. And nice last minute effort
Have never posted on or used product hunt, so it is good to know what to expect from a launch with no initial effort 😆.
Exactly, I felt as though most of the posts regarding PH were either:
A - We blew up and made $$$ after weeks of effort
B - We bombed it and barely got any traction after weeks of effort
I wanted to provide some insight for those of us who just go with the flow when it comes to experimental communities like PH
Product hunt still doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Who are the users? Why are they looking for apps?
I never whip out my phone and think. Hmmmm...I wonder if the are any cool new apps to solve a problem I don't yet know I have.
But I must be missing something, because clearly a lot of people are going. Does anyone know?
From my research, it seems most PH people are also business owners or SAAS entrepreneurs.
It's a great place to promote a B2B product like a sales, marketing, leads tool or a B2C productivity product like an app for notes, time tracking, todolists, etc...
That's generally been my experience, your average joe is never going to randomly open PH to look for a specific tool, most of the time they just google it.
Makes sense, and I guess it depends on your audience.
Might be a little bit of a SAAS/IH echo chamber though :) Something to consider
So coincidental that you posted this today – just now posted on ProductHunt too with the exact same mentality; instead of agonising over the details and launch, just decided to go with the flow.
Hopefully goes well. I much prefer the slow and steady approach so will be glad if it brings in some new users 🙂
Love it and please remember that you can always just re-launch in a month or two if it doesn't work out.
Share the link so I can check it out😃
Yeah I heard about that – do you happen to know if there's some sort of minimum timeframe between relaunching? Can imagine people spamming it otherwise...
Sure thing 😃
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tripup
I didn't yet launched on PH. First I get an impression it's a place where others would upvote your product if they find it nice/useful. But I'm getting more and more feeling it's a place where you can have extended hand ("I'll vote for you if you vote for me" accounts) and the launching is all about syncing how to inform those people - hey, we launched (you know what to do, wink wink), and the game is all about how much army do you have.
please assure me it's still the former, not latter case
Unfortunately, I'm starting to believe it's the latter.
Unless you have a great hunter, it's hard to get featured if you don't tell people you're on PH.
I had to do a solid hour of reaching out to our business contacts to let them know we were re-launching before we got featured. No one found our product until we were on the main page so there's that...
So your target users will use PH a lot? Are PH upvotes# and click# are good metrics for your business?
Nah from what we see they aren't on PH.
Product Hunt upvotes and clicks are nice but they are not crucial by any means necessary
I think i got lucky with producthunt.com/posts/simplefunnel. I had never used it before, didn’t time it, didn’t hype it, didn’t promote it.
Just launched it when it was ready.
It did pretty well at #5 spot and 440 upvotes
Awesome!!
Do you feel it gave you a lot of business?
well, not a lot of paying customers but it gave me other things.
ofcourse I got a lot of signups but more than that I got leverage, it validated the product for me and for everyone who I was gonna send it to after the launch
That leverage is very beneficial and highly sought after.
I was excited to get 3 upvotes on Product Hunt ;)
Well you'll have 4 next time 😃
My guess is that immediately after posting on PH you should ask everyone you know to upvote & comment. I mean, not asking for upvotes in PH, only personal messages or community post, twits etc.
In the first hour you just have to get to the top of products, which will make the product noticeable. After then you'll anyway get more upvotes.
Also it's probably a good idea to find a good hunter to post your product since it's get featured right away (not 100% sure about this)
Yeah finding a good hunter would be ideal but we're still a small startup without much time so we had to choose between time spent finding a hunter vs time spent building up the product.
Next time we'll probably do just that, just post it once we're up and running!
Thanks for sharing. Very insightful!
So glad that you liked it
Thank you for sharing your experience and being so honest. It helps better get into the mindset of what launching on PH would be like.
Great that you didn't let the initial challenges get to you and proactively worked to change the situation! Nice work!
Anytime, I'm so happy this is helping people out.
I know that Product Hunt can do wonders for those with SAAS businesses so I definitely think it can be worth it.
In the wise words of Lenny Kravitz, It ain't over till it's over
That's a great attitude! :)
Thanks for sharing this! We also had a similar experience with Ph which we are to properly analyze in the next couple of days.
Or first, very unplanned launch also ended up on the landing page and we reached a total of 125 upvotes and got some click throughs. This was even though we posted at 1pm CET and had no real clue what to put in there, no group of friends to upvote us immediately and no PH discount code - it simply just worked out.
Being super pumped for our second launch (a free resource) we planned a lot more, asked people to help out, sat at 10am CET and waited for all the upvotes to roll in - after a week we’re still under 20 upvotes. It really crashed and burned. 😅💁♀️I really hope we’ll be able to figure out what went wrong.
Ahh such is life,
I don't think there's a right "formula" to succeed in a PH launch without a famous hunter or anything. Remember that you can always re-launch as many times as needed!
Really curious to hear about your next experience so make a post like this and share your insights!
So, you mean that you don't learn much from this launch? How was your first one?
I'm actually building a product, and our strategy is to wait until we have a big community & validate our idea/product/market.
Do you think it's a good approach?
Our first launch went well but our target users (traders) don't overlap well with PH users (productivity freaks) so we already knew that it wouldn't take off before the second launch.
In my opinion, launch as soon as you have a tested MVP and then just re-launch every few months or so (assuming you've changed enough in your product or added enough features).
Waiting for a certain day to launch is a mistake imo, just go for it and worst case you can always do it again 😃
How have you concluded that "productivity freaks" don't hang out on PH? I am one and I do. Productivity products is like half of PH from my point of view.
Edit: Alos, I looked at your product — alarm clock for stock trading, right? I'm confused then, how have you determined the said customer segment.
Apologies, i may have phrased it wrong.
Our users are traders and product hunt users are productivity freaks. Those 2 subsets don't interleave too often.
Ah, got it! Now that makes sense.