Sh!#! We got hunted by accident.
Our story and takeaways when we got featured in Product Hunt.
As a start-up company there are many obstacles to be faced in the journey to relevancy and success. Often these things are blocked by our own pursuit of perfection that often acts as a doubled edged sword, causing the delivery of a great product or the endless promise of one such product coming to the market. Fortunately for us we never got to pursue our perfectionist nature, but instead were ejected out into the real-world after one guy discovered us and thought we had something special about us…
Like almost every other product hunt story we were not prepared and minding out own business walking down the street. Then some dude(Kevin) just popped out and was like hey! I added you to Product Hunt! (with the wrong name).
Our reaction was like everyone else’s who gets accidentally hunted
So we realizing that people might actually look at our website for once, we had to change everything to make it look like a working product that was not experimenting with things. You know those awkward high school years when you hang out with the goth kids smoking cigarettes behind the school dumpster….
Realizing this we had to contact -he who must not be named- to fix the website. Fortunately for us he was about to get on a 10hr flight from San Francisco back to Europe with no wifi in sight! This was the humble beginnings of the best day ever. With a sudden act of Buddha’s divine peace -he who must not be named- used the power of hotspot to quickly fix our strange price experimentation.
Thus reverting us back to our original form. Ok, all problems solved. We finally could take advantage of PH day.
Here are some of the learnings and small tips that might help you if you see yourself in similar situation:
1. A Media Kit with promotional images and gif of your product in motion!
This might be the most unexpected for us at SlidesCamp, as we created our Media Kit before ever thinking we would actually need it, especially as much as we did on PH day. It included mock ups of our platform, our optimized video, screenshots, our lovely mascot and a cool GIF of us. In Product Hunt having cool mock ups, a moving gif and a simple video can really boost your conversion to sign ups as it makes it easy for people to get to know you without asking them to leave product hunt :)
a. It is just awesome to see our GIF in the main page of Product Hunt :D
b. It took our designer 1 day to prepare the Kit, so you can do it too!
2. Feedback, Feedback everywhere!!!
Ok, Product Hunt members giving feedback may be a very obvious thing, but the point is to make sure that you provide them an easy way to contact you. Engaging with them inside your product makes this feedback much more valuable We use intercom, and their automated messages and it worked perfectly when we got a lot of traffic.
I would add not only for the customer success team to talk with customers, but to incorporate other team members from design/engineering/etc to talk to them, it’s a great experience for the team and helps get everyone on the same page with the needs and priorities of the product.
3. Lot’s of Traffic = Lot’s of Data = Magical results in your analytics tool
This one was saved by Mixpanel. Trust me, the feeling of seeing all the events that you set to track getting so much usage and real time feedback of how people navigate through your product is a really magical thing. Having an analytics tool in place for me is just mandatory, and I guess this one doesn’t count only for product hunt, but if you get featured anywhere that generates traffic, having an analytics tool in place can give you great insights.
4. Engage people in social media — This is what we should have done :(
We really dropped the ball to actively engage with everyone who up voted us on twitter or any other social media. Thanking them for up voting us and starting a conversation could have helped us in boosting our social profiles, and getting more feedback.
So yeah, it was a pretty big success for us that day and those following PH day. The key is to simply trust your gut on being ready, because if you try to plan it out then realistically you may never be “ready”. This was a big spark for us and it’s just the beginning :)
Check our numbers in being the second most up voted product of the day:
