Metrics that matter
Product Hunt gave us more than a moment of vanity
About a month ago, Qapital was featured on Product Hunt. In case you aren’t familiar with us, Qapital is an automated savings product that helps you get on top of your money with automated, gamified savings. It’s a free iOS app that comes with an FDIC-insured bank account in our partner bank — and it earns interest. Sounds great, right? We think so.
We’re a free service that requires a change in behavior and a whole lot of trust-building, which means that in addition to smooth onboarding, a good service, and pretty UI, we need to provide ongoing experiences that earn the trust and loyalty of a long-term banking customer. A standard bank has to pay upwards of $200 to acquire each new checking account customer, and we have to attract and keep ours at a tiny fraction of that cost, and we have to win the trust of a market that is wary of anything with the word ‘banking’ attached.
Product Hunt and Qapital’s challenge
We were lucky enough to be ready for our Product Hunt appearance, thanks to Bram, Ryan, and the instructions in Kiki Schirr’s e-book on Product Hunt success. We created a custom landing page, and added a special offer for Product Hunters, of $10 to kickstart their Qapital savings when they opened an account.
We enjoyed a surge in site traffic and a huge increase in downloads, signups, and new accounts. Since then, we’ve been covered in Fast Company and by The New York Times. Every bit of exposure matters, especially at this early point in our growth.
It’s great to be talked about, downloaded, installed, and tweeted at. Even once we passed the Product Hunt Peak, our rate of growth was higher than it was before. Right now — fingers crossed — we’re actually exceeding our growth goals, and we have been since our day at the top of the Hunt list. We’re growing between 10% and 18% per week, with peaks for media attention, and that’s exciting.
Metrics that matter to us
I know it’s the done thing to share the standard Product Hunt-related data: traffic, downloads, signups, but the success metric we’ve really got our eye on is daily active users, not downloads. Since our success will be determined by long-term retention and a healthy community, we decided to share the two small Product-Hunt related metrics that mattered most to us on an emotional level.
They’re nothing to do with growth, and everything to do with purpose.
1: The first time a customer answered a critical comment on our behalf
Maybe it wasn’t the first time this has happened, but seeing it on ProductHunt was pretty special. A commenter asked why we weren’t as easy as Digit, and before we could respond ourselves, a customer did it for us.
That’s a small thing, true, but when customers start doing your marketing on your behalf, that’s when you really know you’re onto something. Building the app is the easy part. Even making a better banking service is easier than getting someone who isn’t a close friend or family member to wade in on a comment thread to let someone know how great you are.
That’s someone reaching the far end of the conversion funnel, and while we still need tens of thousands of these moments, this one was great validation that it’s possible.
21: The number of celebratory gifs in the Qapital Slack team
Topping Product Hunt was probably even better for morale than landing a funding round. This is validation — real customers! But working together to launch on Product Hunt made us feel more like a solid team than we had in a long time. We’re happy we got the most upvotes, but the effect set in long before we knew we would take the top spot. We even bought a bottle of champagne to open, even though we ended up being too busy and then too tired to drink it.
Normally our team Slack has a few small wins marked with excited gifs. Morale was good enough during our Product Hunt launch to lead to ten times the number of celebration gifs than on a regular good day.
One of our senior developers went out and bought a party hat for our ‘prosperity cat’ so he could make a gif out of it. It looks like this:
After the Hunt
Milestones are great, but there are more challenges on the other side of each one. The Product Hunt morale not only stuck around, it encouraged us to do more to keep it up, even on tough days. And knowing there is even one customer (there are more than that, we know) that is flying our flag is a great reminder that we’re actually building a thing that people want and need.
We knew we’d like Product Hunt, and we knew it would be a boost, but we also know we can’t get distracted by temporary peaks. It did give us lots of new users, and a lot of them have stuck with us, which we’re incredibly happy about. But retention, trust, and community are what will make us grow, and mean sticking to our values, so our eye is on a set of metrics that take a long time to really validate.
Even though we knew the Product Hunt effect isn’t a magic bullet, we hadn’t realized how great an experience it would be for the team, or how long that effect would last.
That bottle of champagne? It’s still in the fridge, and on Friday we’ll drink it just for fun. We might even get a second one.
PS: I wouldn’t be much of a startup CEO if I didn’t encourage you to try Qapital. You can download Qapital for iOS here (we’re still working on our Android app).
