Launching on Reddit and Product Hunt.
I have to agree with @tylerh when he says:
Product Hunt is probably a lot of different things to different people, but one of the things it’s become for me is indispensable.
Last weeek at Forest Giant we launched a new iPhone and Apple Watch app called Quantified. It was super important for us to get on Product Hunt and we couldn’t more thankful for the support we received from the PH team.
As Tyler mentioned, it’s been difficult to predict how PH will continue to grow, but after day one of a launch on both Product Hunt and Reddit, there are some really interesting insights I observed.
But first let me provide some basic stats from yesterday —
We recieved 105 upvotes on Product Hunt yesterday, which netted 645 sessions on our landing page. We also published the same link to /r/AppleWatch on Reddit, receiving about 70 upvotes, but netting us 950 sessions on our landing page.
Just given those stats, it may be easy to point out the Reddit post as being more successful than the Product Hunt post. It could be the case, but there are other metrics I don’t have access to — like how many people linked directly to the App Store from Product Hunt instead of going to the landing page first, etc.
One thing that is clear is the engagement stimulated by each network. After the first day we had over 100 comments on Reddit compared to 10 comments on PH. I scratched my head and wondered why these numbers were so starkly different. Reddit is the “Front page of the internet”, but a subreddit you could compare to a small village of people who share the same interests and passions, or as Seth Godin puts it a “Tribe”.
Product Hunt started just like this little village of people gathering together for the same interest. Early adopters, tech enthusiasts, innovators, entrepreneurs and more, all united under one banner — the latest news in tech products. But as Product Hunt has grown— for many it has become the new “Front Page of the internet”.
I think this says a lot about the engagement difference we saw between the two sites. Product Hunt, which used to be a super small group of individuals, has turned into a mecca of sorts, with an ever-growing diversity of interests.
As Product Hunt’s evolution has happened, the PH team has wisely learned from the success of Reddit. Their Books, Games ( and soon Apps ;) sections clearly are inspired by subreddits. It will be exciting to see how they continue to evolve these areas and how it will benefit the niche markets they serve.
At the end of the day we couldn’t have been more thrilled by what both sites did for our launch day, and we can’t wait to launch more products in the future leveraging both of these platforms.
I admit, there are lots of questions I have that I don’t quite have answers to. I just hope this contributes to the conversation and if possible sparks more questions. :)
Full Disclosure:
In total we received 338 downloads which landed us in the top 10 on the paid health & fitness chart and in the top 100 paid overall.
