How we reached #2 on Product Hunt and got >1000 signups at $0 while sitting at the stadium
On Sunday, we were sitting at Singapore National Stadium watching the Rugby 7s World Series. Suddenly the number of emails in our inbox started to increase dramatically. The reason? We got featured on Product Hunt (PH) with our device ZEIº which makes time tracking super easy.
We didn’t plan our “pseudo-launch” — it just happened.
Can’t go on PH without a plan you say? Agree. Not the best day to get featured you say? Maybe. It’s very hard to make it to the Top 5 during the weekend to be featured in the newsletter yet because of this experience, we would like to share with you how we learned quickly from this.
Charts took off almost like a Falcon
Getting featured on PH and what happened afterwards brought us a lot of traffic. As you can see below, traffic before PH is low. In two days we had ~7000 new users with an average conversion rate of 8,6% which we thankfully were able to raise to 14,6% with the help of the List Builder by SumoMe™.
More numbers and results
Traffic is not all. The output counts.
- 385 upvotes (at the moment of writing this)
- >40 comments
- >200 shares on Facebook, Twitter…
- ~50 page likes on Facebook
- ~70 new Twitter followers
- A couple of emails with potential partners, collaborations, etc…
- A LOT of valuable feedback and ideas
Our recommendations
Engage!
While sitting at the stadium, we spent as much time as we could answering to shares, comments, questions, emails — surrounded by the sound and cheers of an exciting rugby tournament! Champion was hailed and we didn’t stop monitoring and replying to the social public. It was not even easy due to the time difference but that’s what we do best so it was definitely one thing that we recommend for you to also do: don’t stop after 24h! Sustain!
After 24H, we had 275 upvotes and~600 signups. We were a bit sad because we didn’t make it into the newsletter, but we kept on going and people continued to share our product and then we got a feature article on t3n Magazin.
These efforts finally brought us to Top 10 on PH with 386 upvotes and >1000 signups.
Optimize your landing page
As you can see in our Google Analytics, our Conversion Rate of 8,6% is not the best result. You can normally reach 10–20%. The SumoMe™ Popup helped us to achieve above 10%, but if we would had just 3–4% more, we would have gotten about 300 more signups.
That’s why we recommend for every startup to spend a lot of time on optimizing the conversion rate before getting featured. Obvious? Yes! Still we see a lot of startups not doing it (and we didn’t either) therefore we want to emphasize this. It was our plan for the upcoming week but yeah — things happened :)
There are a lot of good reads out there that may help you with optimizing that. Do it!
What’s next?
Now we have to keep the momentum going. As we didn’t plan this launch on PH, we have to hurry up. We definitely have to optimize our landing page. Furthermore, we’re moving on with the preparations for the crowdfunding campaign. If you like ZEIº, we would really appreciate if you could share it with your family, colleagues, time-obsessed or serial “fashionably-late” friends who would love to have an easy time tracking device.
Here’s to share with you more ZEIº coverage shared out there.
All of this wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Mario, the community around Product Hunt and Kim. Thank you all!
Any thoughts, questions, etc. drop us a mail or leave a comment.
Remember, time is the most valuable thing you have!
Cheers,
Manuel from Timeular
P.S. In case you were wondering who won the Rugby 7s — Kenya did!!
