Chronicles of launching a #1 product on Product Hunt
…and some tips to get you through the day
As we just crossed 1,000 votes on Product Hunt, I figured it made sense to share a little of the crazy day we had when we launched. First, please note this is not a tutorial on Product Hunt. It’s my own humble recollection of our launch day that led to being #1 on Sep 2nd, 2015 for our Simply Piano app (and #3 overall for products from Israel e-v-e-r!) coupled with some stats (at the bottom) and a few tips I hope you might find useful. Second, while it may seem otherwise below, I actually didn’t do a lot. The entire Simply team was super active before and during that day, led by the mastermind Nadia Hitman. This is also a great opportunity for a shout out to Ben Tossell, Erik Torenberg and the entire PH team for their help, feedback and support. Thanks!
The day actually didn’t start crazy at all. Knowing that I was going to pull an all-nighter at the office, I had a nice and relaxing breakfast with my wife. You know, work-life balance and all that. Can’t recall what we had, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough.
Tip 1: Eat/rest well before starting your launch
Being in Israel at the time, I had the luxury of getting into the office at 12am valley time (10am Israel time), just as a new PH day rises over the bay area. The plan was simple: Ben Lang, an amazing entrepreneur and a big supporter, was going to hunt our newly released app, Simply Piano. Alas, I found out Ben was in fact in meetings that morning and could only post later on. My disproportional frustration (a repeating sensation, as you’ll see below) was quickly replaced by relief as we discovered Simply Piano apparently hasn’t rolled out on the Apple servers yet, and wasn’t even available in most App Stores. And so, we waited. (Great save, Ben!)
Products started stacking up on PH, some of them getting surprising traction considering it’s now very late at night in all the places that matter for PH. One of these quickly came to our attention — Gimp Online. I know and love Gimp. An online version of it is super cool, especially for the PH bunch; heck, I voted for it. Unsurprisingly, it shot up to the top of the list very quickly.
Tip 2: Check if a massive product was hunted before posting your own
1am: We decided to pause everything. I tried getting Ben on the line to get his feedback and began a relentless (disproportional…) pursuit of my key investor and mentor, Eden Shochat, for his take on things.
1:45am: As this was happening, I suddenly remembered that a good friend who was trekking somewhere in Albania had set a buffered FB post telling her many many friends about our new app. Her post was going live in 45 minutes while our entire campaign was on hold. What drama! So naturally I did the only sensible thing and tried to get into her account. I failed.
In a moment of desperation, I convinced myself the password was going to be her parent’s home number. It was a pathetic and miserable attempt. Her post went live to my dismay, but was soon deleted (little FB dwarfs?).
Tip 3: Keep your eye on the ball, don’t waste time on silly things
2:30am: After much debate, and despite the strong competitors of the day, we decided the launch is a go. The bottom line was that we preferred to continue and avoid a potential tech behemoth on a different day.
3:20am: The plan was to get some of our supporters (who are awake) to check us out, with the hopes that our app will get to the top of the page before everyone wakes up in the US. That proved to be a solid plan. The outreach was organized in a large shared doc and included friends, family, colleagues, some power users, relevant FB groups we were active on and more, all carefully collected by the entire team a week before the launch. We also had our own email lists of close to a million users, which we ended up not using so as not to spam anyone.
We pulled in a bunch of electricity cords and had all the team work from the conference room (aka war room) to tell their friends about our new app. That is, while eating cupcakes and popping some balloons to celebrate the day.
Tip 4: Have fun
3:40am: The internet broke down. I never seem to shake off the surprise whenever this happens in a country full of engineers and hackers. Hotspots emerged all over the office like mushrooms after the rain, thank god for that.
6am: Our own community proved itself and people loved the new app. On PH we quickly reached first spot. Shortly after, I had to step out for a pre-scheduled interview at a NY radio station for a morning tech show. I love going on interviews where you get cut off mid-sentence for traffic reports... At one of these breaks the host thanked me, so I hung up and returned to the war room only to find multiple messages everywhere (SMS, WeChat, WhatsApp, email, Messenger) from my friend in London desperately trying to reach me. Apparently the interview was still taking place and the host was buying time while they were trying to reach me, or as my friend put it: “I can hear the host sweat over the radio”…
At 10am, 8pm Israel time, our amazing investors at Aleph surprised us with pizza in preparation for an all-nighter.
At that point, while answering comments and questions obsessively, I started writing people to check us out knowing that we’ll likely remain on top (knock on wood). The goal now was different - get people I admire, especially high-level supporters, to notice how well we’re doing, as opposed to hoping for more up-votes. This led to my biggest take on the Product Hunt launch.
Tip 5 : The outreach itself is just as important as the PH post
Consider an A-level article written about your company or product (thankfully we’ve had some of those) that you and some of your team might share on social networks. Now compare this to 24 hours where all of your team is genuinely obsessed with sharing with the world your great product, the PH effort, and the amazing #1 outcome. The impact this had on our exposure in the ecosystem, and for team fun, was much greater than what I had hoped for (and much more than any single PR effort). I definitely didn’t see this coming.
Tip 6: Get your team involved in the outreach
Impact
Finally, some stats. For a consumer product like ours, the goal was never #downloads or business leads. In fact, the overall usage you get is dwarfed by a single day of getting Apple love, but the exposure among industry leaders, experts and power users is, well, priceless.
Immediately following the launch we had 3,972 uniques to the PH landing page, about a quarter ended up downloading the app. In addition, we got 100+ visits to the careers page and dozens of relevant business leads, some of which have already materialized into (cool) collaborations. The PH effort also contributed to our PR, leading to cool articles on NYTimes, Lifehacker and Gizmodo, among others. All in all, we had 200,000 downloads in the first 4 weeks.
My 18-hour work day was naturally dominated by the various communication channels. I wrote dozens of posts, tweets and comments, and over 100 emails that day. I was also surprised by how much of my day went into the PH site itself. Replying to comments is the easy explanation, but I strongly suspect refreshing the page took just as much time, if not more… I was also embarrassed to find out that my internet speed tests and my inexcusable attempts to alter my friend’s future FB post took a measurable chunk out of my day as well :)
That’s it for now. For any questions, tips, ideas or suggestions please write me at yuval (at) hellosimply (dot) com or tweet me @yuvalkaminka.
