Our Product Hunt Launch — What most checklists and guides don’t tell you
We finally launched our Design File Converter Magicul last week on Product Hunt after weeks of preparation. The results were rather disappointing considering the time and money we spent on getting everything ready.
I wanted to share some of the things we’ve experienced and learned doing our first Product Hunt launch. Prior to our launch we did a lot of research online and read plenty of posts on how to make our launch a success. The insights I want to share here are the things that those articles didn’t discuss and I hope other people will find it interesting and can learn from.
A few words about us
About a year ago we started working on an Adobe XD to Sketch converter and roughly half a year later we released the first version. It was extremely difficult to get the converter to a level where it would produce reliable and pixel-perfect results. After we took the first hurdle we decided to add more design formats and directions. By now we support converting between Figma, Sketch and Adobe XD in all directions. Currently we are the only available design file converter in the market. Our results speak for themselves: We processed thousands of files and our customers are always stunned by how accurate the results are.
What everyone tells you to do
Here’s a gist of what most Product Hunt guides/checklists online will tell you to do:
- Prepare your launch well, create a nice thumbnail animation and a video
- On the day of the launch gather as many upvotes as possible
- Spread the news about your launch on social media and send out a newsletter
- Launch at midnight SF time
- Run a promotion
- Get someone with a lot of followers to hunt you
- Have a special banner in your website to promote the launch
The things we did prior to our launch
Video & Thumbnail Animation
In order to make sure our product gets viewed by as many people as possible. We created an awesome thumbnail animation and an expensive video.
We created an awesome animation and an awesome video. The video and the thumbnail animation very quite expensive to make and it costs us over $1000 USD. I’m sure you can get something like this done cheaper, but we also wanted it to be nice.
Newsletter
We crafted an awesome newsletter with special promotional discounts and some fancy graphics. We’ve sent the newsletter on the day of the launch.
Discount Banner Website
We added a special banner on our website to promote our launch and give people a special 30% discount.
Our Hunter
A lot of people recommended asking one of the most popular hunter on Product Hunt (Chris Messina — https://chrismessina.me/hunt-me). He has over 22k followers on Product hunt alone. His schedule seemed rather busy and you have to plan ahead of time in order to get a slot with him (there’s a calendar with open slots on his website).
After all we decided asked a friend of ours (Artiom Dashinsky — thanks a lot btw 🙏) to hunt us. He has over 1000 followers.
What we’ve learned the hard way
Ranking & Upvotes
- Upvotes aren’t everything. We had significantly more upvotes than the 6 products before us and still didn’t beat them… It seems that things like reviews, bounce rate and such also play a role in the ranking
- We were place #2 and #3 from 12am SF till 5am SF and went down to #5 and ultimately #11 in the afternoon SF time… Being in the top 5 in the first part of the day doesn’t mean anything 😐 Make sure you get upvotes in the 2nd part of the day (when the US wakes up)
- There were tools that launched in the afternoon that overtook us
- We definitely achieved most upvotes in the first part of the day (12am SF- 5am SF). The problem is most of our users come from the US. Our biggest goal of the PH launch was to get more awareness from US users. But by the morning US time we were not in the top 5 anymore… Which arises the question: Should you launched maybe around 9am SF time instead?
- It seems like things like Main page click through and reviews play an important role in the ranking
- We’ve sent out a newsletter with our PH page, this means probably a lot of traffic bounced (probably didn’t help, maybe even had a negative effect)
- I’ve messaged a lot of people directly to tell them to upvote us (which they did and got us a lot of upvotes, but did it help after all, since they come through a direct link and not through a click through from the main page)
- We shared it across Twitter and a few Slack communities — My gut feeling that didn’t bring us much traffic (depends on you follower-base of course)
Traffic & Sales
- Traffic on our website increased by 160% compared to the same day the week before 🚀 BUT: there was no long term increase of traffic, the week after everything was back to our normal traffic
- We only have paid plans (no trial, no free version). Before launching I wasn’t sure if we should for the day of the launch enable a free version so users cant test it and then upvote (we decided against it).
- We did a 30% discount on our main landing page (it wasn’t used a lot: 3 times in total) — Some people just paid the full price even tho the thing is displayed on EVERY page *sigh* 😂 thanks though!
- In the newsletter we sent out we offered a 50% discount for people that shared the PH link on social media — no one did it — don’t do that!
- After all we did have the strongest revenue in a single day so far but its only about 20% higher than the highest day without an PH launch 💸
What we will do differently next time?
Even though our launch was nice and we received a lot of good feedback, there were a few things that I will do differently.
- Lower your expectations: Most likely you won’t get much out of launching on Product Hunt
- Don’t invest a lot of time into creating a video (most likely images are enough)
- Launch at 9am SF time, not midnight
- Spend less time in preparing the launch (don’t overthink it — just do it)
I’m curious to hear about your thoughts and experiences.
