We just released on Product Hunt! … 47 upvotes later, now what?
Yesterday we did our big release on Product Hunt!
Why was releasing on Product Hunt such a big deal for us?
For the past year so many podcasts we’ve listened to has told us to put ourselves out there, let people find us, don’t wait for perfection. And we kept thinking our app isn’t good enough, it isn’t ready. But with the uncertainty if we’d ever be ready we forced ourselves with a hard deadline. We haven’t marketed anything before so we thought Product Hunt would be the perfect platform for us to start.
We choose to release Tuesday, Oct. 9th after reading these blogs: IndieHackers and Product Hunt, on what considerations to make. Product Hunt explained how they decide on what products make it in for the “newest” or “popular” of the day. They said that any weekday before 9am PST is a good idea, and other blogs corroborated that Tuesday mornings especially would give your product its best chance.
So we started preparation on Monday the day before, from the artwork of our product’s gallery images to the wording of our introductions and app description. But as we started work on this, we got the news that our friend had already “hunted” our product and posted it on Product Hunt. Not on Tuesday, and not in the morning.
We weren’t ready! We panicked. This wasn’t the release we had been planning. But it was done and we moved on quickly to fix the the post. We thought we still had a chance to be on Tuesday’s product list because our friend released late on Monday night. We rushed and made GIFs, screenshots, write-ups, everything. We finished with this.
It’s now Tuesday afternoon. We weren’t placed on Tuesday’s list but that’s okay. We got 47 upvotes, which was in the medium range for the upvotes that day. From these 47 upvotes we got about 16 people who downloaded our app. 7 went through the steps to authenticate. 2 actually came back and listened to a podcast episode.
These results aren’t horrible, but they definitely didn’t meet our expectations of the rush that we thought we would receive. We predicted we would get about 200 upvotes, and our goal was to get 100 people to download and try the app.
Looking back, I don’t think we should have treated this Product Hunt release as big of a deal as we did. We’re definitely happy we did release and got the few new users we did, but we didn’t have to sink so much time, energy, and thought into it. We most likely would have the same results without a Product Hunt special GIF and other Product Hunt special marketing.
