Our ProductHunt Experience And Why You Should Care
Launch of Meed Talent
Published by: Terrell Orr, Director of Content, @Meed
A couple of weeks ago, our team was brainstorming the best ways to get the word out about Meed Talent, our newly launched enterprise product for attracting and hiring top student talent for full-time, part-time, and internship jobs. We know our product will be extremely helpful to startups by saving in recruiting costs and finding talented students who are hungry for professional experience. Meed offers companies the opportunity to invite students who meet their job requirements to apply to their open positions. We were discussing the best ways to make companies aware of our awesome service.
Since we had all heard a lot of great success stories that started with Product Hunt, we decided to give it a shot and submit our product the following Friday. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Product Hunt, it is essentially a community board that surfaces new products every day, allowing visitors to discover the latest and greatest products out there. Having been active in the tech community for quite some time, we know that opportunities like Product Hunt are rare. We realized that to get the maximum out of our day on the site, we needed to be prepared. Our growth advisor Misbah Ashraf took the lead on this.
In the days leading up to submitting Meed to Product Hunt, we worked with our team to gather the materials we needed to submit, write up our product description, and make a plan of attack. On the day of the launch, the first thing Misbah suggested was to post Meed on the site very early in the morning. Product Hunt works in such a way that each day, visitors can “upvote” the products submitted that day. Thus, posting early in the morning allowed for a whole day’s worth of traffic, and gave us visibility on the east coast before most of our team was even awake!
Within a few hours of the launch, ProductHunt featured us as one of the top 10 products of the day!
The next step was up to us — we had to hussle to move up our position via upvotes. Our goal was to garner as much support as possible by asking our friends, followers, families and users to participate in the conversation that was revving up between our founder, Ravi Teja Vadrevu, and the visitors to our page who had begun to ask questions about Meed’s goals and brand. Our team spent a lot of time that day sending emails, making Facebook posts and writing tweets to draw attention to the launch of Meed Talent and to our Product Hunt page.
Remember, as a pro tip, you should never ask for upvotes. Great products speak for themselves. Also, when sending out emails asking for assistance in a situation like this, make sure to personalize them. People aren’t going to help you out if they feel like they’re being solicited or spammed. Here’s an example of an email Misbah sent out:
We started seeing responses from our existing clients
Throughout the day, we were pleased to see support (through upvotes) continue to flood in. However, it wasn’t just the attention and press we were getting that was exciting for us. Arguably the best thing to come out of our day on Product Hunt’s featured list were the conversations we were able to have with interested voters. Through these conversations, we received a lot of great feedback, but more importantly, some constructive criticism. One thing that came up was concerning the terminology we were using to describe Meed’s student audience. It sparked some fruitful discussions amongst our team and we ultimately decided to make changes because of it. Knowing what makes our customers happy is worth hundreds of upvotes in and of itself. We loved having the opportunity to hear back from our interested audience.
A day after the launch
Although we weren’t looking to raise any funds, we received three invitations from renowned Venture Capital firms to talk about our product. They highlighted some of the things founders mentioned in our ProductHunt discussion:
“we’re trying to build transformational technology that values skills more than general parameters like GPA and university degrees”
Two days after the launch
People started using Meed Talent and, not only did they express their love for the ease of use of our product, they started to request new features.
Stats since the launch
1. Upvotes: ~202 (the first day). In and out of the Top 5 all day
2. Direct referrals to talent.getmeed.com: 3,817
3. Qualified leads : 185
4. Sales calls (from those leads) : 26
Check out our new Meed OnCampus which extends your foothold at 20 top university campuses this fall.
To us, Product Hunt is like a more interactive and product oriented version of Wikipedia. The creators of Product Hunt really know what they’re doing and we’re extremely grateful for the product they have created. It was an honor to receive so many upvotes, to be featured, and to converse with our audience. We truly feel that we gained and learned a lot from the experience.
