The ProductHunt Effect
How Product Hunt blew up LinkTexting.com.
tldr: This is the story of how LinkTexting went from 2 guys working on a couch and begging our friends to adopt our product to being approached by Fortune 500 companies.
Pre-ProductHunt
Before being posted to Product Hunt(PH) LinkTexting had:
7 actual users. They weren’t paying users, but we were quite ecstatic about this.
Getting our first users was a slow and painful process
We begged each of our early users the slow way—manually. It took as many as 10 customer touches to convince some of the first 7.
The founders of eatstackd.com and Coride agreed to adopt us. It consisted of no less than 3 hours of phone calls, emails, and bugging them in person.
Early User Feedback & Product Changes
Per the feedback of our customers, we underwent some early changes to facilitate the implementation of our product. At the time one of our core dependencies was figuring out how to bill the customer and handle twilio appropriately. Thinking about how to manage credit card processing fees and customer happiness was pure mental speculation.
One of our biggest mistakes was requiring the user to fill out their credit card details twice. Once to pay LinkTexting and another time to sign up for twilio connect.
We fixed this after a few early customer conversations.
We were able to get more leads into the funnel and all the way through the sign up process.
Our Early Adopters
Here’s some of the founders/early adopters and their thoughts on our product.
“We increased conversions by 25%. LinkTexting solves a very real problem.” — Adam Braus, Founder of Coride.co
“The site looks good and it’s 100X easier then trying to build it ourselves. “— Tony DiMatteo, Founder of Glimpsable.com
Blogging + HN Post
In the early hours of LinkTexting, I tried to create traction by blogging. I wrote an article entitled “Why We Built LinkTexting.com” for HackerNews while Brian spent painstaking time reconfiguring the backend payments system.
I asked my friends to take a look and if they liked it, to upvote it.
The article received minimal traffic, most likely from Brian and I asking friends to look at it. We knew we had a solid product, but we needed a solid push.
This was frustrating for the simple fact that we spent more than an hour writing the blog post.
Then a miracle happened. We got posted to ProductHunt.
Then one day out of the blue, we got a random uservoice message telling us LinkTexting was posted to ProductHunt. We were shocked to find that someone else jumped the gun by posting us earlier than we had planned. We wanted to be the ones to introduce our product to the PH audience. It resulted in the meteoric rise of LinkTexting and surpassed all expectations.(see below)
We both remember exactly where we were when we hit PH.
Results:
In the 18 days after we were posted, we received:
150 signups
32 engaged emails with users.
20 meetings and conversations with users.
+ Paying Users!!!!!
After being put on ProductHunt, our signups blew up by over 500% in the first 3 hours.
Within days we were getting approached by household name companies that wanted enterprise pricing for 30,000–100,000 texts per a month as well as analytics service.
How to Optimize your ProductHunt Appearance
- Answer questions on the PH thread as soon as possible. Reply and upvote them for taking the time to give you feedback and look at your site.
- Send tweets to people who upvote you. They’re doing a huge favor to you, be thankful and they’ll remember you.
- Tell your followers and email list about your ProductHunt feature.
- Make sure you have google analytics in place. :p
- Put LeadFeeder.com into place. It’s free to try and awesome to buy. ☺
- If you don’t have a conversion target with your app, put http://hellobar.com into place. It’s also free.
- Benchmark your landing page against http://goodui.org
- Set up google analytics event tracking for the event sign up and install the custom report for full URL referrals using this link. This will allow you to give a valuation to your backlinks. ☺ You may have to customize it a bit.
- Make sure that when you share your page on facebook, linkedin, google+, and twitter, that the share image appears properly.
If you think we can help you think through UX, talk shop about building product, engaging users in a creative way, or just want to say hello, then shoot us a tweet @datarade, @blaurenceclark, or @linktexting.
