Paddle.com Got Featured On Product Hunt — Boosted Signups By 73%
The start to 2015 gave everyone at our London startup, Paddle.com, a whole new meaning to “hitting the ground running”. As if settling into a new office isn’t tricky enough, we were in the middle of launching a couple of new new features — subscription payments and in-app analytics for iOS & Mac—and helping hundreds of new sellers who were trying to avoid the new EU VAT laws affecting digital products too.
To give you some context: Paddle’s checkout and range of developer tools makes it easy to sell apps, games & digital products.
Despite the busy period, all of our hard work was worth it when Paddle got featured on Product Hunt, an awesome website for “product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations.”
Paddle’s Journey to Product Hunt
After a creative weekend creating Non-app Calendar — “a printable PDF calendar, designed with attention, that helps you break your goals into smaller, actionable chunks” — entrepreneur Gregoire Gilbert was looking for a way to start distributing it.
Unfortunately for him, changes to EU VAT laws made it difficult to sell digital products without a ton of admin work to go with it. He needed a way to quickly start selling Non-app Calendar without having to deal with the new laws himself, and that’s when he came across Paddle.
In an article on his blog, EntrepreneurLoop, Gregoire wrote about how he launched Non-app Calendar in just a few hours:
The very first thing I did was to setup the payment and delivery platform. I needed one that could handle or help me deal with the VAT mess (see new EU law for more details about it). I’ve tried several of them, and struggled with buggy interfaces or unclear pricing. Then, I tried and ended up using Paddle.com.
Once Gregoire launched his website and started driving sales, he noticed that several entrepreneurs in his community were asking about his opinions on Paddle. That’s when he kindly offered to post us onto Product Hunt, and here’s what happened.
The Product Hunt effect
Plenty of entrepreneurs have written about “the Product Hunt effect” on their businesses, so we were aware of how it could potentially affect us. Looking back at the numbers though, we weren’t expecting to see the kind of positive impact we did!
Signups
On the day we got featured (14th January 2015) we saw a huge 448% increase in daily signups. Even now, our average number of daily signups is 73% higher than it was pre-Product Hunt.
The spike in traffic
Paddle.com had an impressive 3,167 referring visits from Product Hunt on the 14th January alone, with a total of 7,041 to date. Since getting featured, we’ve seen a 56.44% increase on daily visits too.
Upvotes & Comments
The 425 upvotes we received allowed Paddle to get featured in Product Hunt’s email digest which was awesome, and thanks to many of our customers who left comments supporting us, it left a great impression of Paddle on Product Hunters too.
In fact, we’ve had plenty of new signups mentioning that the positive comments were an influencing factor for them joining Paddle! Tom, one of those signups got in touch with us with the following email:
What’s up! Found you via ProductHunt, couldn’t have come at a better time. Currently finishing up my eBook… Paddle is definitely tickling my pickle.
Nothing beats social proof
Growth in signups, traffic spikes and upvotes are nice, but reading what our customers had to say about Paddle was one of the best parts of our Product Hunt feature. They’re the ones using us day-in, day-out, and I don’t think anybody can talk about the value Paddle provides better than they can.
Matjaz from Pinegrow wrote:
We use Paddle for selling our app Pinegrow Web Editor and are very happy with it (sold about $100K in the past year). The biggest pain that Paddle is solving for us is taking care of VAT… Guys at Paddle are helpful and responsive, so I’m happy to recommend them here, especially for EU based sellers.
Brad Jasper, the developer behind Focus wrote:
I use Paddle with http://heyfocus.com and it’s been great. I wouldn’t have been able to sell outside of the App Store without it, and the ability to purchase on the web in addition to the app is a huge boost for revenue!
Shiela Dixon of Peacock Media wrote:
I can’t recommend Paddle highly enough. I started using Paddle to take payments for my software about a year ago and by the end of 2014 I’d moved all of my software over to Paddle — the fact that they handle the european VAT for me was the imperative there but the system works so well. Big plusses for me are the user-friendliness (for the paying customer and for me) and the fact that they manage the number of times a licence is used.
All of these guys are independent developers/creators who use Paddle to take away the burdens of selling their apps, so reading their comments and recommendations was amazing for us.
Thank you!
Getting onto Product Hunt wouldn’t have been possible without Gregoire, so we want to send out a huge “thank you” to him. And of course, a huge thanks to the Product Hunt team for building such an awesome platform for cool products and startups to get some recognition.
Hope you guys liked reading about our Product Hunt experience, and if you could hit that “Recommend” button below it’d be much appreciated. Feel free to connect with me over on Twitter too, via @FabioVirgi_.
