Insights from the Initial Launch: Starting a Fintech Startup on Product Hunt
Product Hunt is believed to be a simple yet powerful shortcut to gaining massive feedback from a large community of founders/VCs. This platform has proven on many examples that if done correctly it can accelerate your growth from Day 1. Launching a fintech startup on Product Hunt cannot be easy, but is very efficient for your business for sure.
In this article, I will be writing about our first launch experience of Comfi (a BNPL payment gateway for SaaS vendors), and the results we got.
BONUS: tips and tricks we’ve used
Tips for Launching Fintech Startup on Product Hunt
Here are some steps you can take to maximize your chances of success when launching a fintech product on Product Hunt:
✅Plan ahead to give yourself enough time to prepare for the launch. You should develop a clear value proposition and unique selling points that differentiate your offering from others in the market. Don’t forget to promote your product launch in advance through the coming soon page.
✅Engage with your potential customers before launch day. Share sneak peeks of your product, ask for feedback, and build excitement around the launch. This will help you create a loyal following and generate buzz around your launch.
✅Choose a time that works for your target audience, and the day that works for you. Product Hunt tends to be more competitive from Mondays to Thursdays, but these days can also generate a significant amount of traffic. As the week progresses, activity on the platform tends to slow down. Saturdays and Sundays are the least competitive days on Product Hunt, which may increase your chances of being the top product of the day, but you may receive less traffic overall.
✅The first thing users will see is your product page, so make sure it’s engaging and informative.
✅On launch day, promote your product on social media, email your mailing list, and ask your community to upvote your product on Product Hunt. The more upvotes you get, the more visibility your product will receive.
Our Experience and Results
You’re probably at the same point right now as we were, thinking about launching on Product Hunt for the first time. Below I am writing about our experience, good and bad, that you can learn from. I am sharing the real results so you know what to expect of the launch, especially if you are a similar fintech company.
Promotion🔝
Promotion is a huge part of your Product Hunt launch. We have promoted our launch in advance, using social media. We’ve made 8 posts, announcing the launch, asking people to support us, and sharing shoutouts that we’ve got from other Twitter and LinkedIn users. It is very important to be online answering comments and keeping your social media followers posted on everything that’s going on on Product Hunt.
Creating a limited-time promotion or discount is a great way to generate more sales or sign-ups during your launch. Thus, we’ve made a special launch offer for our Product Hunt customers: 0% fees for the 1st month of using Comfi.
Expectations ☄️
Since our targetted profiles are seed and bootstrap SaaS startups looking for upfront capital and revenue boost, we believed that PH is the most relevant space to gain them and that the launch will be the catalyst of our expansion to the US market and a battle test of the internal management processes (i.e. are we able to onboard and manage 10+ vendors at the same time).
Expected results:
- 1k unique visits to the website
- 10 meetings booked (1% conversion)
- 5 onboarded SaaS vendors (50% conversion)
Overall, the conversion from the total number of unique visits to the onboarded vendor was expected to be less than 1% (quite a realistic expectation, right?).
Reality hits differently 👋
So there we were, ready for our first product hunt launch. Against our expectations, the launch started well and we got top-10 from the moment it was launched (big thanks to Chris Messina, top#1 Hunter who hunted our product).
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, we ended up placing in the #7th position, and gaining 292 upvotes with 75 comments. We missed the batch that the first 5 products get and that you can embed on your website. And all this although we had the most upvotes on the day.
Our launch was followed by tremendous support from our friends and we’ve secured a top-10 position to have good visibility for potential leads.
As a result, we got only 1 meeting booked with the SaaS vendor from Italy. Not even close to our expected performance of 10 meetings booked.
BUT… WHERE ARE THE LEADS? 😕
Let’s take a closer look at website conversion.
In total we had 512 sessions from 15.03 to 20.03 during the launch week with 428 unique visitors. On the day itself, there were 400 unique visitors.
The website hits come mostly from the US (28%), followed by India (18%). According to Similar Web these are also the two largest community groups on the platform. The device behavior shows that most people have visited our site via the Desktop browser.
We got a conversion of 0.23% to the meeting booked.
The problem with these upvotes is that they came mostly (50%) from our network and the positive comments we had were more like a gesture to help, rather than the real interest.
Our Conclusion
The main insight into our fintech product launch on Product Hunt is that the platform is great for letting people know about your product. It gives you a lot of unique visitors. We had Day rank #7 which is not a bad start. All in all, we are satisfied with how our campaign went, even though we would have liked to have more meetings booked. To all of you out there: Take a chance! Launch on Product Hunt!
