Trending on Product Hunt during YC’s Demo Day — the Seed-DB experience
I had a bit of a weird experience on August 19th this year.
- It was Y Combinator Demo Day, and I knew to look out for startups launching so I could enter them in Seed-DB
- That morning, Jack Smith had submitted Seed-DB to Product Hunt (thanks!)
- At about 7am, I got notified that Seed-DB was trending on Product Hunt
- Later that day, Product Hunt presented as one of the YC S14 startups
And the circle of self-promotion closed, as Seed-DB was promoted on Product Hunt, driving people to see the YC listing on Seed-DB, which showed users that YC’s class had Product Hunt in it.
What does this mean for stats? Well, let’s go to Google Analytics. Here are the hourly pageview stats for the week on either side of trending on Product Hunt:
I think the first spike came after initially trending on Product Hunt, and the second spike came after the Product Hunt daily e-mail was sent. How does this compare to Seed-DB’s traffic across the year? Well, it was by far the biggest spike:
And here are the stats from the “referral” acquisition channel for a week on either side of August 19th. Product Hunt drove over 2000 people to Seed-DB:
Since then…
Product Hunt has grown massively since then, and would now probably drive an order of magnitude more traffic for the top trending products. For me, August 19th was a bit of a surreal day but was pleased about the coincidence in the timing.
I was recently going over the statistics, and Seed-DB has grown virtually every metric by 30–40% compared to 2013. While I could look at that in startup terms and say “meh”, because I don’t do any marketing of the site I’m pleased that more and more people are finding it and finding it useful. I’m going to be adding a few key features in the coming months, so please stay tuned!
