Launching on Product Hunt for my birthday
21st July 2015 was my 25th birthday and I wanted it to be different.
The Stats after over 1200 upvotes on Product Hunt*:
19,017 Users
81,298 Pageviews
58,283 Unique Pageviews
3.38 Pages/session
Average Duration 2 mins 20 secs
(*Updated: 1 week after launch)
Marketing Stack is a curated directory of marketing resources and tools
We were posted on Product Hunt yesterday (here) and this is the story so far…
Pre-Product Hunt
I had been working on Marketing Stack for the last two months, in the evenings and weekends. Throughout this time I trawled through over 800 marketing resources and tools before I had a semi-final list that I was happy with featuring on the site at launch.
(Inspiration for the site came from Bram’s Startup Stash and I spoke to him before all of this. He was/is very supportive and offered to post to Product Hunt when I was ready)
I was lucky enough to have the very talented (and #1 maker on PH) Mubashar Iqbal offer to build the site.
It was basic, but did the job and more importantly I could start populating!
I posted to BetaList with a mockup from Daniel Kempe (and I must add, some much appreciated advice from Cat Noone also).
When this was featured (6th July 2015) we had around 500 users visit the site. Throughout the week it went up to 1,343 and had collected 353 email subscriptions — not bad!
2 emails were sent — one welcome/little intro and another which was a sneak preview (around 4 days before launch).
Some great feedback from the subscribers which helped tweak a few things before the site was ready. Also quite a few people reaching out about their tools being featured (I had actually already included these).
Product Hunt launch
I’d moved into my new flat on the Friday and of course, no internet! Shit! Good start. Trying to move that weekend was a bad idea.
It came to Monday 20th July — was everything ready? Of course not, but luckily not far off (and Mubs is so quick anyway!).
Few last minute tweaks, but Mubs has just said he will be offline most of the day 21st July. Uh oh! Fingers crossed then.
Morning of…
Sumome had disappeared— Shit!
HelloBar will have to be altered — Shit!
Didn’t include an email on the homepage — Idiot! (me)
Will wait for Mubs to be online to sort the Sumome issue then I can change HelloBar to the top again, also he will be able to add the email. Damn, timezones are hard.
Catch up with Bram to make sure it is all sorted and he posted it at around 10:30 British Summer Time.
Votes started to come in as I tweeted it out, posted in a couple Facebook groups, mentioned it in the Slack communities and emailed my awesome subscribers — and of course, I posted in the comments:
Votes start coming in but we were behind the #1 by 50 votes before we started! Luckily, we catch up after an hour or so and make it to the top…and stayed there! Wooooooooo!
Saw between 50–70 users on site most of the day. Highest I saw was around 86.
Twitter was going wild, and it was hard to keep up with everything!
I went out for a meal to celebrate my birthday with my family, then went to sleep. Next morning I woke up and was pleasantly surprised with what I saw :)
I don’t think I need to put in all the awesome tweets of support I have received, but I do need to say that I am really humbled by it all.
It certainly was a birthday to remember and as my first project on Product Hunt I am overwhelmed by its performance so far!
This story will be edited along the journey and I would like to thank everyone for their support in the build up and aftermath as it could not have been a successful launch without you!
So maybe another *TIP* needs to be added to Product Hunt Launch recommendations…Do it on your birthday!!
(I have tried very hard over the last few months to be a valuable member of all the communities I am lucky to be a part of — this is one of the best things I have spent my time doing because it allows you to connect with the people who can help you so much in times like these)
So far so good!
This is my story so far and I can’t wait to continue sharing it with you. It is one of my first written posts so bear with me as I try to improve my writing skills!
If you would like your resource to be considered for the site please email me at hello@marketingstack.io.
I’d love for you to hit recommend if you liked my story so far :) always happy for you reach out on Twitter anytime @bentossell
