The Producthunt Effect — 1,816 email subscribers in 6 days

“I created uiGIFs so I could document & share some of the fun and unique interactions I find in apps.” That’s what I generally say when asked about the site.

I’ll be honest, there’s a bit more to it than that. I initially decided to make uiGIFs because I was looking for dev work and wanted to add a couple of Wordpress sites to my portfolio.

I wanted to make something slightly more interesting than a blog, and I got the idea for uiGIFs when I saw how easy it was to record videos of an iPhone in action with OSx Yosmite.

I threw the site together in ~one day and started adding some GIFs. It looked great on my portfolio, so it essentially did its job even though it got hardly any traffic and almost no subscribers.

Last Wednesday, Jack Smith posted uiGIFs on Producthunt, which then led to it being shared on DesignerNews, Tympanus, and Sidebar. I’m sharing some of the numbers behind the “launch,” because who doesn’t love seeing the numbers?

High level numbers:

• Total visits: 17,467
• Email subscriptions: 1,816
• Conversion rate: 10.4%

Top referrers:

• Producthunt.com: 2,237
• Tympanus.net: 1,641
• Twitter: 872
• Facebook: 788
• DesignerNews: 769
• Sidebar.io: 465

Google Analytics is also showing 7,457 direct hits, which I assume are all actually referrals too.

As you can see, a large chunk of the traffic came directly from Producthunt, but the site also got some bumps when it was shared with other communities.

One of the amazing things about all of this is that uiGIFs ended the day ninth on Producthunt. Ninth! That means eight other sites had an even crazier bump in traffic.

Things I learned

• “What a time to be alive” — It’s just insane that a tiny little site that’s hosted on a $5 a month DigitalOcean droplet can reach so many people in such a short period of time.
• Novelty is sharable — People seemed to be sharing uiGIFs as if it was an interesting blog post. The novelty of the idea makes it an interesting “piece of content” for their audiences.
• A clear target audience helps — uiGIFs was clearly for designers, so it organically spread through different design communities
• “Products for marketing” could be an awesome strategy — If I had some sort of SaaS product that targeted designers, uiGIFs could have been a great piece of marketing for that product. Although this could be a great strategy, I hope we don’t end up with a bunch of crap products being released to promote other crap products.

Who knows where uiGIFs will go. The beauty is that by fulfilling it’s original purpose as a token portfolio item, it’s already a success!

If you want some animated UI action and haven’t signed up yet, you can do so here.