How I finished #2 on Product Hunt
…or 3 steps to get maximum traffic from your Product Hunt launch
Last week I launched my new service on Product Hunt. In the first 24 hours we received 3,786 visitors to our website, 485 registered users and 128 confirmed accounts. That’s ~13% signup rate and a 26% conversion rate. Two bloggers posted articles about our service in 2 different languages (Spanish/German), and we received a ton of love from the community at large.
In the first 24 hours we had 3,786 visitors to our website, 485 registered users and 128 confirmed accounts.
First, what do we do?
Monitority is a reliable and simple website monitoring service with a twist: it’s absolutely free (unlimited checks, SMS text notifications, Email and Twitter alerts).
Why did we decide to launch on Product Hunt (PH)?
Product Hunt is a community of smart people eager to try out new stuff and engage with like-minded people. Every day, PH users or Hunters as they are called, can post any product they find interesting. It’s important to note that a product can only be posted on PH a single time (with some exceptions). Once posted, the community can vote it up and the product with the most votes is listed at the top of the page for that day.
My story:
The evening before the post, I spoke with Ben Lang, founder of mapme, and asked for help with Product Hunt. Ben suggested that we create a special page for PH users, welcoming them and allowing them to try Monitority directly, bypassing our beta queue. Another thing Ben mentioned is that that by posting on PH in the evening (GMT +2) we’ll have significant less time to be exposed (and up voted) as PH servers are based on the west coast time zone (GMT -8).
That night, my co-founder Mike Peters and I worked most of the night, putting the process together with a unique welcome page for our special guests from PH.
Next morning around 11am Israel time (Midnight on the west coast) Ben posted this on PH:
Immediately we started getting traffic and throughout the next 24 hours, we had 10–40 people at any given moment on our site, checking us out and trying our service.
My inbox started to overflow with new users (Yeah, I get an email each time someone registers. it’s a fad I know)
In the first hour we had 30 new registered users, more than our best day ever, a new record, yippee!
At the end of the day, posting on PH gave us a better understanding of our users’ needs, ideas on how to improve the on-boarding process and an overall validation of our service.
My 3 insights about launching on PH:
- Control It: Most products on PH probably get discovered and posted by Hunters at random. They find stuff, they post it to PH. Since you can only get posted ONCE(!), you should try to control the timing, so you are not surprised by a mass audience hitting your servers (while you are upgrading your server… in the middle of a birthday party… or happen to be swimming with dolphins…).
Don’t wait to be discovered, as soon as your product is functional, go full force and control it, which brings me to insight #2 - Time it: PH servers run on (GMT -8). Now I don’t want to get into the mambo jambo of GMT & time zones — but you want to be posted as soon as a ‘new day starts on PH’ so you get the best bang for your buck and a full day’s worth of traffic. It’s easy to understand that if you’re one of the first posts of the day you’ll have the most time to WORK IT. Enter insight #3:
- Work it: Working on it means getting votes (or hustle in Gary Vaynerchuk lingo). As one of the top five products for the day on PH, you get maximum exposure and a large number of visitors (+ a high probability to be included in the newsletter that is sent on the next day that also drives a lot of traffic).
Disclaimer: You probably won’t be able to stay on top with a shitty product — regardless of how early you post or how hard you hustle. At the same time, a great product is often no enough. Still, you should ask everyone and their mother to vote you up, and we went as far as creating a special email to ‘Hunters’ who just registered, reminding them to vote us up (see below).
Happy Monitoring & Hunting
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