Product Hunt Increased Our Traction by 850%
This is the story of how a product with just a handful of active users grew by 850%, all thanks to Product Hunt.
When I launched my first SaaS startup back in 2009, I got lucky.
I had just built a project management tool and had just a few users including myself. I managed to get an opportunity to guest write on a popular blog and promote my product for free. It blew up, and within weeks I had about 3000 users.
Today, launching a product is a lot tougher.
For my latest project, HourStack (a simple time tracking and resource allocation app), I tried the same approach as I did 7 years ago. I tried sending tips to popular blogs, and contacted smaller blogs offering to write a guest post, but heard nothing back — which left me frustrated and unsure of what to do next.
Then I heard about Product Hunt from a friend who had experienced great success with it. He sent me an invite, and on the Friday of that week I posted my new app and started watching Google Analytics in realtime.
The votes started going up, and the traffic to the website started increasing.
Within hours I had 50 new users who were actively engaged, integrating with Slack and posting comments on our Product Hunt page. I was addicted to watching the users roll in and the buzz kick off on Twitter (to the point where my wife would get irritated by me being glued to my MacBook even during mealtime!).
The next day (after getting very little sleep), I checked in and saw that we had reached 100 votes in the early hours of the morning. That meant also we got tweeted by @producthunt and had various retweets from that. The buzz continued throughout the weekend.
There was other buzz too, such as various emails, very positive feedback from users, offers to partner and opportunities to share my story.
Inevitably, after a few days the activity started to diminish and less was happening on our realtime analytics and on our Product Hunt page.
However we had a very nice spike in our traffic. After all the buzz, we ended up getting real traction. The active users started coming back, and people were actively using our product.
We ended up having a 850% increase in active users thanks to the Product Hunt launch. In other words, the traffic we had from PH was extremely good quality and a good percentage of the traffic we received actually converted to active users.
This all happened only two weeks ago, and it was fun. But now we have the task of building a product that serves our users. Building an API, integrating with Zapier, integrating with Asana, Trello, Xero and other popular services.
The road to growth may be slower now than it was two weeks ago, but we have had a really good head start thanks to Product Hunt, and a bunch of very happy and active users.
