Optimizing For Product Hunt: How Not To

Looking for some open kimono? Not to worry, I’ll keep it SFW. This post is designed to serve as a post mortem of Intellifluence’s recent launch (and front page) on Product Hunt. As you can imagine, being my first launch on the platform, I learned quite a bit rather quickly.

First, some stats. I’ve read many of these posts myself (after the fact of course…doh!) and I tend to gravitate towards data as a form of “proof”, so for my clone in an alternate universe, hopefully you see this before you accept to be hunted and can tweak a couple things to make the Product Hunt effect that much better. Spoiler: it was still pretty great and I definitely would (and will) do it again.

We like to track as much as we can, being the marketers that we are. As you can see from the stats, we definitely experienced a sizeable traffic pop on what we consider our brand entry points — the index page was where we delivered Product Hunt traffic with a ?ref=producthunt querystring, and of course as you would expect it shows a 9x from the previous day since we send influencers to a more appropriate section.

Additionally, we were pleased that we saw corresponding jumps on pricing page views and influencer search views (note: this is not actually influencer searches, as that is a behind the iron curtain so to speak). The bummer was on brand registration pages, which while nice, didn’t even match my outreach activities from two days prior. However, we are still getting traffic specific to this campaign so it is theoretically possible that as a campaign on raw views, it could outpace some of our other efforts. Of course, MixPanel isn’t telling the full story, as the traffic quality, in terms of conversions was…well, is fingomgawesome a word?

For fun, let’s look at previous Thursday to launch Thursday in Google Analytics by channel to see how different the traffic was [keep in mind, we launched in July].

August 18, 2016

August 25, 2016

As you can see, raw traffic was definitely up week over week and conversions were also higher. I believe we ended the day with 220 up votes so the 69 new brand signups were definitely significantly higher in proportion to the traffic increase. Part of this also is due to how much of our traffic is coming from signing up influencers. ;)

Now that the kimono has been opened, let’s look into what we did and how we will optimize for a future launch.

Best Time To Launch

We launched on Thursday, August 25th at 7:30am. This wasn’t an awful time for the most part. There were a few mitigating factors that probably killed our potential momentum a bit though, which I can get into:

1. Product Hunt announced Product Hunt Daily; anytime Product Hunt hunts for themselves on the same day as you are launching, well, things aren’t going to be optimal. This should be pretty obvious when approaching any community because attention will naturally be drawn towards their launch; it isn’t entirely a zero sum game though since it is possible some regulars that haven’t been to producthunt.com lately might be drawn in by the release and stick around for your launch. However, if you’re in the same category, you aren’t going to be the hot and trending product. Sorry.

2. Raven Tools launched a couple hours earlier, also in the marketing category. I have a lot of respect for Jon Henshaw, so when I saw that he also had launched the same day we had planned to launch, I implored those in my marketing groups to check his stuff out, and then check out mine. Why? Well, while we are competing for trending status, the products aren’t in competition whatsoever, so that was more about the long game and respecting him having executed quicker and not sinking his chances to trend — which his product did. Congrats to their team.

Changes for next time?

There are quite a few articles out on why Tuesday is the best day to launch, but I fear that this is now leading Tuesday to become a bit crowded. Tuesday is better than Friday-Sunday, but Monday is starting to look attractive again, and Wednesday looks solid too. For a day, I might actually pick Monday next time, if this trend continues to show fewer Monday launches since Product Hunt traffic is robust on that day.

Also, instead of pulling the trigger at 7:30, we’d opt for just after midnight (Product Hunt server time), to ensure we get a full 24 hour day chance on the front page. If you can get popular enough, it isn’t a huge deal, but why not optimize to give yourself every advantage possible?

The Pitch on Product Hunt

This is probably where we made a mistake, and given our backgrounds, is a head slap. Much like optimizing in PPC, one needs to write a creative hook that names the product and describes it in a clever way.

Title: Intellifluence
Desc: Intelligent Influencer Marketing

Accurate, but boring. Since the Product Hunt community is slightly irreverent, we could have had more fun with this. If I could do it all over again, it might be something more like

Title: Intellifluence
Desc: Like Tinder, except we get you product reviewers

Getting Front Paged

If you want to hit the front page, it is pretty simple as far as I understand it. Launch your product, give away something special just for the Product Hunt community (we did the ‘producthunt’ 75% off code w/ custom infobar landing page on referrer), and then either ping one of the community managers, or bug your network to get in touch with a community manager since a preference is given to those products that are of significant value to the PH community. Then, you need to promote.

Promotion

If on the off chance you’ve heard any of my speeches from the 2013–2015 time frame, you’ll know that I like to say no marketing activity should ever exist in a vacuum, meaning you can’t just expect to push a button and expect immediate success. Campaign approaches to marketing require a pre-launch checklist and outreach, the launch itself paired with an increased outreach function, and follow up to that activity to ensure the loop has been closed. The degree to which this makes a difference cannot be understated; it is huge. We didn’t whiff on this, as we do have ~250 up votes as of right now, but we can do better for next time.

What did that checklist look like?

1. Collect a list of Facebook groups relevant to our product, interaction within those groups prior to launch, and letting the communities know that we had launched on Product Hunt, with a special promotion — we were careful to not ask for up votes. Ask for people to check it out and enjoy a discount; if it is a good product, you’ll get the up votes.
2. Determine a list of industry friends in a similar vein to the Facebook Groups that would be potentially interested in the product. Immediately after launching, we informed them, which drove some activity — again, don’t ask for the up votes or you’ll have a bad day.
3. Current trailers. We partially whiffed on this as we had decided initially to reach out to all brands that previously trialed the product but didn’t convert AFTER the campaign had run its course. In retrospect, this could have been accelerated, with more eyeballs…very interested eyeballs even, that would jump on the opportunity to save 75%, and maybe get us trending. Next time we won’t make that mistake.
4. As for follow up, on the shame-o-meter I register a zero, so I dressed up as He-Man and am hitting up communities to spread the message far and wide on our having been in Product Hunt and wanting to count on both brand and influencer support to grow.

He-Man talks Intellifluence

Another promotional element for next time simply has to do with how Product Hunt works. The longer you interact with the community by leaving intelligent comments, checking out other makers’ products, and generally being a good person, the larger your follower base becomes. Thus, you can build up a type of digital karma so that the next time you launch, you are more likely to get more attention by having given attention.

Feedback Received

If you’ve ever put any product or service onto the market, there’s always that bit of hesitation where you think “What if people hate it? What if they don’t understand it? What if…?” Screw it: launch and then evolve if necessary.

Perhaps we were lucky or perhaps we did mostly what we set out to do for a MVP on this launch, but the feedback was largely positive. What I liked about it most is that the suggestions we received were for items already on our product roadmap, so people wanted us to develop what we were planning on developing on future sprints anyhow.

I love all feedback, positive and otherwise, so I’d like to thank the hunters that left me good feedback, namely: Kris Jones, Braden Hamm, Elizabeth S Hunker, CWilson, Artur and Nidhi Shandilya.

What’s Next for Intellifluence?

Head’s down. There’s a scene from the Social Network where a programmer’s attention can’t be procured because he is “locked in” — that’s going to be several members of our team for a while. Essentially we have two big pushes coming up, which we internally are referring to as the Messaging push and the Offers push. At the end of every push we will be raising our plan prices to bring them more in line with the value provided to our community base, which is a gift to early adopters since their plan pricing is always grandfathered and they benefit from more revenue = more product development.

Messaging Push

Without giving away the farm and giving us flexibility in case we decide a feature might make more sense in a later push, this push will generally focus on the following:

1. Reporting — by popular request, we’ll start creating useful reports that make it easier for a brand manager to extract the most value out of using Intellifluence.
2. Lists — some brands have requested being able to create lists by select multiple influencers and sending a single message, to save time. Makes sense to us!
3. Conversation tracking — wouldn’t it be cool while using the discovery tool if you would be able to see who you’re already talking too? We agreed on this one, so it’s going to happen.
4. Other stuff that I don’t want to disclose just yet.
5. Price increase for new subscribers.

Offers Push

If you read my previous post on why we started Intellifluence, you might remember that we actually launched with offers initially and then pulled them back. This push will be about bringing the functionality back in a much improved way and creating a separate subscription plan for those brands that want to make use of offers. What type of additional functionality are we thinking about?

1. Intellifluence influencer score finalized and added to our discovery filtering: score to incorporate brand feedback, responsiveness, accuracy, and relative value of social profiles and blogs available.
2. Revision flow — not everything will work the first time and we realize that, so we’ll be defining a flow that makes it relatively easy to request and receive revisions.
3. FTC compliance auto check; as this is a state of the industry, we want to make everyone’s lives easier.
4. Goal reporting — this is a big one that can mean a lot of things and will require a lot of work.
5. A lot, lot more that we don’t want to comment on just yet.
6. Plan price increases for the initial plan and launch of the offers plan.

This ties back to a post on Product Hunt because you can’t just get your product hunted for every new feature; there needs to be some significance to it. We are planning on approaching the community again after completing our Offers push (which could be anywhere from 2 months to 6 months depending on how much we decide to cram into each push). By the time we are ready, it is my goal for us to not just front page, but to deliver so much value that we are listed in the PH newsletter on “things you missed” which as I understand it, drives even more traffic than a front page listing on Product Hunt itself.

Until next time.