A hardware startup, Beta List, and Product Hunt
After 12 month of developing, designing, and prototyping, we’ve finally come to the step where we can show the world what we’ve been working on — Oivo.
Oivo is the smallest charger on the go for iPhone. To charge the smartphone, it uses the most widely used batteries, the regular AA type. What’s special about Oivo is its design. It’s so small that it fits on a keychain.
It uses neodymium magnets (credit card and smartphone safe) to hold the halves together when it’s not in use and to hold the batteries in place when it’s charging.
Four weeks before the Kickstarter launch, we made a simple landing page and started collecting emails.
We knew that getting relevant emails from people that are interested in your project and want to be notified when we launch the product on Kickstarter is crucial, but we still weren’t finished pimping our Kickstater campaign page (making the video and making lifestyle product shots), so we couldn’t really concentrate on getting media exposure. Luckily, we ended up on Beta List and Product Hunt, which both drove some quality visitors to us.
Beta List
I wanted to get some traffic right away, so I paid to jump the line and get the Expedited Review on Beta List. It cost us 69$, and it drove us 471 unique visitors directly from Beta List, but more importantly, our Beta List page was shared 505 times on Twitter and got 42 likes on Facebook and 26 on Linkedin, which generated even more traffic from social media sites. We collected 76 email contacts from Beta List visitors.
It was definitely money well spent. The average CPC for an early technology adopter relevant for Oivo on Facebook is 0.10$, so it’s somehow more expensive than Beta List, but the quality of traffic from Beta List is much higher. Visitors from such a specific site are more likely to share your story and show it to their friends. We also got contacted by a few journalists that were interested in covering our launch.
And without Beta List, we probably would not have been featured on Product Hunt.
Product Hunt
A week after our Beta List post, we were very surprised when we found out somebody from Tel Aviv recommended us on Product Hunt, and we immediately noticed the increase in buzz on Twitter.
We were constantly on the top 10 products that day, but never on top, always around the sixth to eighth place, but we were still getting up-votes and visitors. More importantly, we collected roughly 407 emails from people that wanted to be notified when we started raising funds on Kickstarter and that will hopefully back us.
We received a total of 4293 unique visitors from Product Hunt, which generated a lot of tweets and drove even more traffic to us. It also got us in contact with journalists, which will hopefully result in more exposure when we launch the Kickstarter campaign.
Oivo’s Kickstarter launch is on Monday, and I’m really curious if the emails collected from visitors from Beta List and Product Hunt will help us get the ball rolling.
Addendum: You can see that we got much more traffic from Product Hunt then Beta List, however the conversion rate (email signups/unique visitors) was higher for BT (16%.1) then PH (9.5%). The reason becing that BL provides you more info (text and pics), while on PH you only see the title and the subtitle of the product.
We launched on Kickstarter. Please support us if you like the idea.
