Numbers to Aim for on a Product Launch
Baseline numbers from launching a side project that went viral
Last Sunday (7/26), I released WFH.Ninja, the parody excuse generator for when you want to work from home. At its peak, our site was trending on the top of Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit (/r/InternetIsBeautiful), and several media outlets such as The Next Web, Business Insider and Fortune.
As with all product launches, the initial traffic spike has died down. In its wake, I would like to share some interesting statistics.
Statistics to Beat
I hope the following numbers provide a good benchmark as the numbers to aim for when launching an actual product. While I understand that every product is different, here’s what the numbers looked like for wfh.ninja, a free consumer-based web app.
User Acquisition
- Grand total of 76,420 sessions with 70,538 users over the first week of launch. Majority of the traffic came from US, followed by France, UK, Canada and India.
- At peak, Google analytics reported more than 800 simultaneous users on our site. Traffic during the hours of 6–7am PST exceeded 20 requests per second, which required us to scale up our database instance and number of frontend python gunicorn workers. This corresponds to the drop in traffic in the graph below.
- I posted the link to Hacker News, specifically Show HN. Several users left positive comments and suggestions, some of which I implemented right away. I also posted the site to Product Hunt.
- From there on, The Next Web picked us up, and other news syndications followed. I reached out to Mic Wright (@brokenbottleboy), the journalist from TNW who wrote about wfh.ninja. While he said that one of his sources had pinged him the link, he also regularly finds content from Product Hunt and Hacker News.
- We were featured on 3 media outlets — The Next Web, Business Insider and Fortune.com. With a typical launch, a PR company may be involved, and from past experience, they could could cost anywhere from $5K to $15K / month.
User Engagement
- I considered an engaged user to be one who voted at least 3 times. This would mean that 63% of my total visitors were engaged. In fact, 75% of all visitors voted at least once. I believe this was because users were forced to take an action in order to derive further payoffs, ie. they had to vote in order to view the next excuse.
- There were 800,000 total interactions (in the form of votes), which is an average of 11 actions per visitor. This may vary depending according to the nature of the product.
- Since wfh-ninja was a crowdsourcing site, one of the key goals was to get visitors to contribute an excuse. The “conversion rate” of this goal was about 3%, with more than than 3600 new excuses contributed in total.
Interesting Notes on Crowdsourced Content
Of the 200 excuses in active rotation, only 30% of them have a positive score. I believe that this could be due to users constantly pressing on the “this won’t fly” button in order to view the next excuse, without realizing that they were skewing the results.
The skew was more negative initially. I noticed that I had placed my upvote button on the left of the downvote button, and decided to experiment with swapping their positions. This is a pertinent lesson on how design choices will impact user behavior, which is key for crowdsourced content.
When I released WFH.ninja, I envisioned the site to be a place where users would submit creative and interesting excuses. However, as the number of visitors increased, I noticed that the top excuses reverted to a common “boring” mean.
- 8 out of the top 10 excuses were medical, ranging from specific ailments like cold, fever and diarrhea to vague symptoms like “feeling under the weather” and having a doctor’s appointment.
- Other popular reasons included having to run errands (personal, spouse, kids, house-related) or waiting for delivery of something important.
- There were also quite a number of excuses related to simply being more productive at home since there were less distractions from the office (bad coffee, bad internet, distracting coworkers, etc).
- All pet related and most personal reasons were rated negatively. Fair warning, excuses such as “my cat is depressed”, “I’m still hungover”, and “my car ran out of gas” are not going to fly.
I’ve put together a quick summary page of all the active excuses in rotation and their score. You can view the results on http://wfh.ninja/summary. Enjoy :)
