How we accidentally launched on Product Hunt (with numbers!)
Right, to get things started; quick intro. Jamie and I are building a curated music discovery app called Combo.fm. We pushed to the App Store just under a month ago, and we’ve been iterating over it since.
With the bulk of bugs pretty much sorted, we thought it was about time we got some users on the platform. Step one: Product Hunt. Right?
Jamie and I began to make plans to actually try to get the app “hunted” on Product Hunt in the coming weeks. As far as we were concerned, we had shitloads to do before then:
- Get the website sorted. At the time, it was a currently a half-day job we threw together for getting beta sign-ups. It did a pretty horrific job of actually educating the user on what Combo.fm actually does (which is pretty important). To put it honestly, I probably wouldn’t download Combo.fm if I’d been forwarded to that page.
2. Get rid of our hideous temporary logo.
3. Plan timings. We figured that we’d probably need to rally together our beta users, a list of friends and family emails, just to let them know; but some of those people were in different time zones, and we wanted to guarantee we’d at least get an open when they were most likely to read it through.
4. And of course, properly research the process of launching to Product Hunt. We had so many questions. What time should we post it? We see Makers often stay as the top comment to give a bit of an intro to the product; how can we guarantee that? Jamie and I are avid users of PH, but in terms of actually submitting stuff? Nope. Not a sausage.
So…yeah. To put it lightly, there was a fair bit of work left to do before we were Product-Hunt-ready. We had it pegged at around 3–4 days work in total to make sure launching was going smooth enough — and we read somewhere that it was better to submit earlier in the week for a bit more exposure, so that pushes it back to early the following week…yeah.
So current timescale? At best, launch on Product Hunt around two weeks from today. Nodded in agreement, a little disheartened we couldn’t move into it quicker; but agreed with Jamie’s points. It wasn’t ready yet.
Flash forward to the next morning. Friday. I walked up the silver stairs to the first floor of the Ustwo office, and turned the corner to greet Jamie at our desk.
Jamie was staring stony-faced at his Chrome browser.
Product Hunt was open.
And there we were.
Our shitty logo, sat slap-freakin’-bang on the front page. Right next to Medium (this very website) and the badass doc-editing software, Canvas.
I slumped down at my desk, and snapped Jamie out of his woeful gaze. The mission? Lock down that 3rd place spot. The plan? Get the word out as quickly as we could. It was 9am UTC; we knew that the American audience would be logging on in four hours, so…let’s move, yeah?
Twitter. Facebook. Beta list emails. Slack channels. We did everything we could to make people aware that our tiny little app was sat on the biggest opportunity it had had so far.
Nothing makes you assess your situation and prioritise what needs doing than being thrown head-first into a scenario like this. We could have spent those hours we were getting the word out there cleaning up the logo. Maybe that time was better spent working on the website. But were either of those a real priority? Nah. So, we embraced our terrible logo and left our website as it was (much to Jamie’s dismay).
Did it pay off?
We’re pretty proud to admit that yeah, it actually did. Here’s the breakdown.
We got a big bump of almost 1600 users visiting our landing page (Combo.fm), on feature day, followed by 445 the next. Those numbers are all well and good — but we’re running an iOS app. How many downloads does that translate to?
We got a big spike of 323 users on our first day, then oddly enough, 198 the next. This is based off of UTC, however — so it’s possible that a big percentage of the 198 on the second day were US evening PH’ers.
The Bottom Line
Whichever way you look at it — that’s 681 downloads from 2237 page visits over a two day period. That’s about 30% conversion. I’m not good with numbers; but I think seeing as that was a sure-fire catastrophe 48 hours earlier…it went pretty well!
We had a bit of a reflect after the panic had cooled off at the end of the day. Could we have done more to prepare? Yeah, of course. Could we have gotten more conversions as a result? Almost certainly. But Jamie and I are meticulous humans, and could have easily spent all that time over-preparing for the launch by doing the things I mentioned above.
The advantage for us now we’ve done our Product Hunt push? We’ve just netted ourselves a free week to focus on actually improving the app. Don’t get me wrong, we’re going to need to spend time on cleaning up the logo and the website before we look for any serious press; but right now, our priorities lie in getting the product to the best state it can be in the least time possible. And this “disaster” has helped us do just that.
I guess the main takeaway for us is that we need to spend more time believing people who have confidence in the app. We heard countless times from multiple early users that our app was good enough for launch about 3 weeks before we shipped; but we still hung on and held back, focusing on minor details.
Who knows what else we could have achieved in that additional time? More user testing? More users?
The Best Bits
The bump in new users was great, but sadly, all good things come to an end. It’s been two days and the spike has been and gone. But we got so much more than just users from the launch;
We got an influx of emails! All sorts of people reached out to us; users offering to curate music for the product, others offering to be beta testers; even people offering their own professional services to us.
We managed to rack up over 50 comments on the PH page through keeping conversations open with everyone interested. Some of those have gone on to become future beta testers; something we always need more of.
We got a ton of tweets (mainly off the back of one Product Hunt tweet that was put out) that really helped put us on the map.
But the greatest bit of the whole lot? We’re pre-any-funding at all, we’re both flat broke; but that didn’t stop us from celebrating the only way we knew how — with the best damn burger in all of London. Bird of Old Street, we salute you.
To close; I’m still getting my head around Product Hunt launches and how they work. I’d love to hear about your Product Hunt launch and how you found the experience; was it similar to this, or remarkably different?
Finally: We’re a super early stage music discovery startup, documenting the little wins and losses and all the learnings that come along with those on our Combo.fm Medium publication. If you didn’t think reading this was a total waste of time, then you should check out the other articles we’ve got! ✌🏻
