How We Acquired 26,447 Users and $207,152 in Sales on Product Hunt

I launched Fedora on Product Hunt a year ago.

While hundreds of blog posts have covered Product Hunt launches in great detail, this post is a full year in review — what happened in the one year after we launched on Product Hunt on April 15 2014?

How It All Started

The vision behind Fedora was simple — building the easiest way for people to make money teaching online courses without having to go to a marketplace and give up ownership.

Six months in, we had attracted a small base of beta users, who were collectively processing a few thousand dollars in monthly transactions across ten different monetizing schools.

After stumbling on Product Hunt, it became clear that this would be a great place to “launch” — not just because of the traffic it would inevitably bring, but the fact that PH looked like the right channel to launch fast and ugly.

That’s a huge part of the Product Hunt effect — by virtue of an incredibly supportive community, it has become a safe space to launch quick and dirty.

So after getting an intro to Ryan, I was pretty stoked when this happened:

Boom, we were in business.

Launch Day

Of course I didn’t remember to take a screenshot on launch day — this is what it looks like now.

30 upvotes. 64 signups. 2 paying users.

Not bad, but a far cry from the other Product Hunt launches I had read about. Regardless, there were 64 brand new users that may have never heard about Fedora otherwise.

The 2 paying users was probably the coolest part though — not huge, but a massive victory at the time since I had only built the ability to pay for a Fedora account the day before ☺

We went on to become one of the first “single-person-in-a-room” products that launched publicly on Product Hunt that eventually become a full-fledged company with $2m in funding, a full-time team of 9 and even an office.

The Leverage

The funny thing I did not know at the time was that our relationship with Product Hunt was only beginning.

By virtue of being a platform that helps creators create their own product (in our case, online courses), that was to be the first of many Fedora Product Hunt launches.

Instead of being exposed to Product Hunt once on launch, every time one of our teachers had a launch, it got us in front of the PH community.

And launch they did.

In the last one year, I have tracked at least 16 different products launched by Fedora creators on Product Hunt.

So… just for funsies, I decided to run the numbers for source = producthunt on our internal analytics to see what the net effect across our entire network was:

Wow. Product Hunt had driven $207,152 in lifetime course sales and 26,447 students.

Analysis

1. Holy shit. Product Hunt is a great channel for acquiring both a high volume of users and most critically, users that are willing to pay for products. That’s huge since most other channels get you either quantity or quality.
2. Our creators built high-quality products. The average number of upvotes each of those courses received (246) is substantially above the Product Hunt average (~81). Also, since our teachers tend to eventually create multiple courses, a user derived from PH might eventually have multiple product purchases driving their LTV up.
3. Still an early adopter audience. Non-programming, marketing and design courses have not performed anywhere near as well on Product Hunt traffic in terms of number of upvotes, dollar value of sales, conversion rates or pretty much any other metric. Not to say this won’t change, but right now Product Hunt’s sweet spot is still programming, marketing and design — and by a long shot.
4. Product Hunt is a real, tangible business. That is no mean feat for a community-driven product (Digg, anyone?).

We should be paying Product Hunt

Considering these results were produced serendipitously, we would be willing to pay a serious amount of money if we could strategically invest in Product Hunt as an acquisition channel.

Off the top of my head, we’d love to collaborate with Product Hunt in at least three different ways:

• On-site Payments: PH could dramatically increase conversion by allowing their community to buy the course on their site and take a percentage. It’s a lot of work to become a payments company so it’s probably not immediately interesting but very high potential.
• Technology Licensing / Sub-hunts: Since we are a white-labeled platform for teachers, we do absolutely nothing for the people that come to us every day looking for the newest cool courses on our platform. If we could work with PH to set up some kind of “PH for Fedora Courses”, that’d be a unique way of handling course discovery . I’d also bet that it would increase the percentage of our teachers that complete creating the course they are working towards since they would have an audience to launch it to.
• Sponsored Products: This one is obvious and probably an intuitive next step — but the idea of a Sponsored Product. Looking at the numbers indicated above, I find it hard to imagine this wouldn’t be a positive-ROI ad spend for any high-quality online course in programming, marketing or design.

Until we can pay, we’re going to keep riding the free promo to $1m in Product Hunt sales ☺

Interested in teaching online? Use Fedora to create and sell online courses on your own site.