Launching on ProductHunt as a fitness app — The Pros & Cons
As a marketing manager of a fitness app, I constantly look at how to grow our user base and promote our app. ProductHunt is a great place to launch a new app due to the tech-savvy community it hosts, but also because of the many influential individuals and organizations following what happens on the platform: investors, the media, Apple among the most important ones. But is there truly a place for a fitness app in a “geeky”environment like ProductHunt?
When looking at how many apps were hunted in the Health&Fitness category in the past 3 months, here are the numbers:
July: 88 apps
August: 75 apps
September: 81 apps
Looking at the same months, how many of those Health&Fitness apps reached the #1 product of the day:
July: 3 apps
August: 1 app
September: 1 app
To put that into perspective, here is the total number of apps hunted in those months:
July: 427
August: 468
September: 387
These numbers are from http://www.phlics.com & https://www.producthunt.com.
To give a little bit of context, here is what type of hunted apps are categorized as Health&Fitness on any given day:
As you can see, it’s a varied mix of mental health, productivity hacks & SaaS and even refreshment services. Health&Fitness covers a very broad spectrum on ProductHunt, and fitness apps or products don’t seem to make up the majority of this category. Very few have to do with actual physical activity, which is what a fitness app is about.
In addition, ProductHunt is inherently dominated by people who live & breath tech. Back when it was founded in 2014, TechCrunch described the platform as “becoming a daily must-read for those in the tech industry.” It continued by saying that “the site is regularly read by a number of high-profile tech industry founders, product enthusiasts, reporters and investors”. This positions the platform as ‘tech first’.
With all that in mind, does it make sense to post your fitness app/service/product on ProductHunt? Is there an audience for it?
Well let’s take a look at some fitness products who’ve done well on ProductHunt.
- Freeletics, a service/app offering high intensity workouts and training plans did really well when they launched. They became #5 product of the day and have 613 upvotes in total. They are still a successful company today constantly developing.
- Naked, a body scanner in-home product, first launched 2 years ago, became #4 product of the day and garnered 815 votes. Their second launch ‘only’ got 453 votes by comparison (launched 2 months ago).
- Progress, a visual fitness timelapse app became #3 product of the day when they launched. They also got engagement from the founder of ProductHunt himself, Ryan Hoover.
Speaking of Ryan Hoover, he seems to have an affinity for fitness products when it comes to ProductHunt.
He himself hunted Peloton Tread, an in-home treadmill some months ago. He seems to be keeping a pulse on the fitness tech industry.
Here he is commenting on Mirror, an interactive home gym:
He upvoted and commented on Naked’s latest launch:
His comment on Progress:
It’s safe to assume that, if the thought leader (and actual leader) of a platform engages in a certain public behavior, the rest will follow. That’s encouraging!
Bonus Tip
ProductHunt is constantly improving their processes and growing their business, so now before launching you can create a pre-launch campaign and get exposure weeks or months before your actual launch.
The new service is called Ship and it allows you to be featured on the homepage of ProductHunt with your name, tagline, image/gif and a subscription link where people can sign up to follow you and get notified on the day of your launch. This feature is part of a paid plan, but it’s worth it. Check out my app’s landing page to see what it looks like.
A feature on the homepage looks like this:
A note on the fitness industry
The fitness industry has been developing immensely in the past few years, with more gadgets, services and products popping up that make the exercise routine easier to start, keep up and follow. We have watches that track your steps, apps that remind you to stand up and move once in a while, millions of apps that track what you eat, your calories etc. With the focus growing on health, self-care and exercise, there is a natural increased attention from the makers and users all around the world — and that includes ProductHunt.
If you’ve reached this far, thanks for reading! As soon as I’ve launched our app in 2–3 weeks, I will follow up with a Post-launch learnings post, so stay tuned! Follow our current pre-launch stage here.
