The Product Hunt Madness — SendPulse’s pre-launch
A short e-introduction:
I’m an 90’s kid and Internet Explorer, so I’ve been online for most of my life. So naturally, when Product Hunt launched a little over a 2 year ago, I was instantly started all hunts on the site. The funniest thing is that I ended up getting sucked into the vortex of interesting that is Product Hunt, and am now an active member of the community. Products like Startup Stash, Tesla Model 3, Periscope, Gboard by Google, Medium, DropBox, Prisma, Pexels, PolyMail are some examples of #1 hunts on the day.
BTW — if you don’t know what Product Hunt is a discovery platform where people can submit new and interesting tech-focused products, and the community can discuss them and upvote them if they like them, sort of like Reddit for tech products. It’s so awesome to hear what the Product Hunt feature did for them: huge traffic spike, a feedback, IT-news and coverage, new users and interested investors & partners, all because of Product Hunt.
This made me want to build something myself so I could hunt it!
SendPulse e-introduction:
Let’s start with a background on our product and company.
SendPulse is an integrated messaging platform that enables users to communicate on all gadgets by Email, SMS, PUSH, SMTP etc. SendPulse platform was created by a team of IT-geeks and digital-guys who have 10 years of experience in the field of programming, tech entrepreneurship, advertising and marketing.
This means we all contribute to: Design, Development, Growth & are living off savings and the revenues we make from the SendPulse. Currently, there are more than 60 employees in the company with offices in US and Europe.
SendPulse is quite easy to use and it can help startups, small and medium businesses manage their promotion, specifically: to attract subscribers to the website; increase brand awareness, notification their clients about novelties, promotions, discounts, etc; At their disposal there are a lot of opportunities to create great newsletters: the drag/drop editor, personalization, statistics, A/B test and Android and iOS mobile app for view the results on the go.
This worked great!
SendPulse’s Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Predictive Analysis:
However, we never stop trying to improve. One day we decided to be on a step above the usual old-style digital-marketing and started our work on creating Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Predictive Analysis.Despite the fact that the AI (Artificial Intelligence) is now a trendy and hot-idea, and there are a some companies, which create it too, we decided to combine the three technologies: Personalization with Machine Learning technology, Predictive Analysis, Artificial Intelligence for global digital-marketing. The reason of the development of these technologies lies on the fact that modern people do not wish to receive a bulk mailing. Nowadays, it is very important and effective to send an individual newsletter, analyzing the context and sending a personalized email as soon as a user made certain actions, such as opening the mail. Then you can send webpush during the updates, and sms in a certain geolocation. All of these messages must have a different design, content-marketing depending on the location or the gadget, time-slot. Only such newsletters will bring you great results — around 50–80%.
SendPulse Al can analyze the results (clicks, errors, sales) and to predict, for example, that you can improve the efficiency of the newsletter sending one more SMS and Email.
Here is how we thought about pre-launch and the initiatives, and It is impossible to be successful without a community supporting you.
The Product Hunt Madness. This was crazy!
Once the SendPulse Al-technology has been created for beta-test, we wanted to show it for the Product Hunters. I’m not here to tell you how great Product Hunt is for users.
The Product Hunt community specifically, are full of optimistic, helpful people who root for other people to succeed. But we did get something I did not expect: lots of tech community attention (especially investor attention). We also had several investors reach out to us wanting to talk about maybe getting in our seed or A-round. Here’s another cool thing about Product Hunt that I think very few people actually understand: all of this happened even though we did not have a special Product Hunt launch strategy.
Getting your product hunted like a pro!
Product Hunt has become a force to be reckoned with in the startup world.
For companies that land in the top slot of Product Hunt’s Reddit-like homepage — as Kindly and many others have — the payoff is dramatic; like Reddit or Hacker News, the Product Hunt community has built-in protections against your spammiest temptations. The real Product Hunt bump comes from the tech influencers who frequent the site, who in turn attract media coverage and in some cases lead to investments. In Kindly’s case — which is fairly typical — reporters from major news outlets wanted to know more about his startup and future plans. The early adopters who make up the Product Hunt community see dozens of new apps and services every week, so your product should stand out. It doesn’t need to be perfect, necessarily; The crowd there is used to seeing betas and unfinished proofs of concept and is generally forgiving if the central idea is solid enough. This tactic also comes in handy when the press comes calling.
As polished as your product may seem, it won’t be perfect. Happy Hunting!
There will be something to criticize, and the smart, well-connected people on Product Hunt won’t be shy about pointing those things out. As potent as the Product Hunt bump can be, it’s not going to single-handedly propel a company into superstardom. The gains it brings, while significant, are all short-term. The resulting spike in page views or signups is exactly that: a spike. It will go down, and it’s up to the startup to make the most of the press, investor contacts, and potential talent that Product Hunt success ushers in.
One thing I should warn you about: the community there is great, but they are not push-overs. They are very intelligent and sophisticated, and you can’t talk to them like an advertiser or marketer addressing a bunch of captive dolts. They will ask hard questions, and judge you based on how you respond. You have to be real and answer their questions directly and honestly, or they will see through your BS and not engage you or your product. So to sum up, Product Hunt is awesome, and I highly recommend you use it, even if you don’t fit their traditional product profile.
Happy Hunting from SendPulse!
P.S. In the next article, we will be happy to share with you the details of Product Hunt’s pre-launch, the development of know-how, secrets that will be useful for startups. This was crazy!
Hit me up on Twitter via @SendPulseCom if you want to know more.