7 things we did to prep for our Product Hunt launch of data.world.
Yesterday we launched data.world on Product Hunt and it was amazing. I can’t say enough good things about the Product Hunt platform. They have built an easy to use, full of personality, fun place to share with like minded people. (see the post on Product Hunt here).
Our team at data.world prepared for weeks for this launch and it paid off. At the end of Friday, we were the #3 most voted for product on Product Hunt and doubled our highest daily acquisition number. More, the users from Product Hunt were exactly the type of users we want on our product. Curious and engaged.
While there are many factors that contribute to a successful Product Hunt launch, we thought we share a few things we did in preparation that proved fruitful. Here are seven tips that hopefully help in your launch.
Plan ahead
We started thinking about launching on Product Hunt months ago. We studied other successful launches and spent a lot of time thinking about the optimal time for us to launch. As alluring as it is to just ‘hunt’ your product immediately, the benefits of proper planning are tangible. We engaged Product Hunt experts early on and asked them to be part of our strategy. Most were eager to jump in.
Get everyone involved
From marketing to product to legal we had everyone involved. It started out with a small tiger team made up of one person from each department. As we defined our goals we pulled in more and more people who were happy to get involved. Having company wide buy-in was important. It allowed us to coordinate feature releases, terms updates, creative and social assets, and readiness. All of which were important on launch day.
Have a party
Nothing gets everyone in a room like breakfast tacos so that is what we did. We wanted to make sure everyone knew it was happening and was ready to fix problems or answer questions. We opened a Slack channel dedicated to to the events of the day and made sure people were briefed and on the ready.
Create an immediate way for Hunters to get involved.
We wanted a way to engage Hunters beyond just the posting on PH. So, we created a project and asked them to contribute. Working with the PH API we were able to assemble the most comprehensive set of data that has every been released on PH. From there we asked our data scientists to do some preliminary work on analyzing it. After, we asked the community of Hunters to get involved. This way, they had an immediate use case for our application. You can check that out here.
Build a kickass landing page
We had an internal debate about how we wanted to handle in coming traffic from our product hunt posting. Should we simply ‘pop’ a message up on our home page triggered by the ref=producthunt parameter? Or should we dedicate hours of work to building a custom landing page for them. We chose the later and it paid off. Our highest performing acquisition asset from the launch was that landing page. We had several A/B tests running to confirm this. You can see the landing page here.
Facebook Live
Another facet to our strategy was to do a Facebook live event in the afternoon of launch day. Here we would answer questions from the comments on the PH listing and we cross promoted the event on both platforms. We asked our director of product engineering to share his 5 favorite features of data.world and answer questions posed in the comments on PH. This was another fun way to keep the momentum going. The FB Live event lasted about an hour and we saw a direct correlation with signups after that event. We also used this broadcast to demo a featured that we hadn’t announced yet which was a nice way to reward people for watching.
Create a custom welcome email
We asked our CEO Brett Hurt to write a custom welcome email to Hunters where we went a bit deeper than we normally do in explaining why we exist and how they play a part in it. This helped those visitors feel like they were getting something that was made for them. Something that said we care about your opinion and participation.
If you are more curious about what goes into a successful Product Hunt check out our Product Hunt dataset on data.world. There you will find hypothesis and analysis using data obtained through the Product Hunt api. Several people have put together interesting visualization around this data and we’d love your help in further exploring.
- Check out our launch on Product Hunt.
- Check out our Product Hunt dataset.
- You can find me on twitter @bgadoci. I’d love to chat!
