How To (Re)launch Your Application?
And acquire almost 6,000 new users in 24 hours. Preparation, content, objectives and results, some tips for any entrepreneur who would like to launch or relaunch their startup.
The Impact of TechCrunch and Product Hunt During the First 24hrs of our Launch
During the past six month, we decided that Bunkr needed to (re)start from scratch — build a new team and create a new product. After six months under the radar, it was essential for us to come out the woodwork quickly, with a bang.
Here’s the story about Bunkr’s relaunch: how we organized everything, how we communicated with our users and media outlets regarding the change, and the outcome two weeks after we relaunched Bunkr.
Preparation — A Private Beta Version.
As Alexis (Bunkr’s CEO) explained in his article, we decided to rebuild Bunkr in July 2014. To know more about why we took this route click here to read his story.
In the beginning of November, our technical team finished the first part of our new application. We decided to invite 100 of our most active users to test the new version and work with them to improve Bunkr.
- November: Invited 100 users to test the new application
- December: Interviewed 50 users for 20 min (each) & emailed 50 users for feedback
- January: First product iteration with all of our beta users feedback
(Re)Launching Bunkr — TechCrunch and Product Hunt
Our objective was to work on a format that tells our story and why we decided to completely change our product.
1 — TechCrunch: exclusive story
I reached out to Romain Dillet, a writer at TechCrunch who had already written about us, to see if if he’d like to write an article about our relaunch. A few days later, Romain responded, asking to interview Alexis and I, so we could introduce the new product.
Bunkr featured on TechCrunch:
2—Product Hunt Post
Two weeks prior to our relaunch, I reached out to Product Hunt to feature our application on their website. Being that we had already shared our previous version on Product Hunt, and they’re very strict with posting updates, we contacted Ryan and Erik from the Product Hunt team to see if it would be possible.
After exchanging a few emails with them, explaining how this version is completely different from our previous version, we were given the green light to post the new Bunkr on Product Hunt the day of our relaunch.
Bunkr on Product Hunt:
Bunkr on Product Hunt
Bunkr: Elegant presentation of your web content (new update)
www.producthunt.com
Results and Debriefing
The outcome of our relaunch was amazing! We gained roughly 6,000 new users in just 24 hours!
4 Keys of success:
- Be Transparent: People really liked how sincere we were in the TechCrunch article. It’s not always easy to be completely truthful, but these are the stories your audience wants to hear from you.
- Be Exclusive: Everybody wants to have hundreds of features on hundreds of media outlets. But if you’re exclusive with the media outlets you share your story with, you can be much more detailed with the journalist/blogger that’s interviewing you.
- Be Engaged: It’s your job to engage with your audience, not the other way around. Be the first person to start a conversation with your audience. In Bunkr, we integrated Intercom.io to create a dialogue with our users.
- CEO Content: The day we launched, Alexis, our CEO, wrote an article on Medium explaining what happened these past six months. We sent that article to all of our users and received a lot of feedback and support from them!
How to improve for the next time?
Once we relaunched and sent out Alexis article, many new and old users asked us a lot of questions about the new features.
We posted a lot of content to help users, such as: animated GIFs, testimonials, tutorials, etc. but we forgot to create videos showing how Bunkr works.If we could do it all over again, that would be something we’d create and share before we relaunched our product.
Last week, Michael , our new Growth & Community builder, produced a quick video showing how to use Bunkr and some functions:
