I’ve Had My Startup(s) On Product Hunt 3 Times
Here’s Some Data.
Fatberry comes from a proud lineage of pivots.
Rewind the clock to last summer, and I first set out to create a Google Chrome Extension that made it easier to get writing edited by a real human. In July 2014, I launched SpareSquare.
Back then, there was this little thing called ProductHunt that seemed like a nifty (and free) way to get in front of a few folks. I submitted (hunted) it myself, and worked directly with Ryan Hoover to come up with the tagline “Human Proofreading @ the click of a button (Chrome Extension)”. (I was insistent on the cliche “Uber for proofreading” until Ryan convinced me otherwise.)
My site wasn’t up for long (a few months), but Product Hunt by far sent the most traffic in that time. We got 64 upvotes and 1,363 site visits, meaning that it took 21.3 visits to earn one vote. With no other data to go against, it seemed reasonable!
Fast forward a few months. I synced up with my cofounder Tim, and together we took some of the learnings from SpareSquare to build and launch Whttl on October 8th, 2014. Instead of just editing-on-demand, we decided to branch into everything-on-demand. We wouldn’t be the providers of the service, but instead we would connect people with the hundreds of amazing services that already existed in a really relevant way. By building the world’s largest (we think) database of the ZIP codes that location-based products serve (Homejoy, Lyft, Instacart, Sprig, Munchery, etc.), we could connect people to new services that launched in their locales.
On November 13th, we hit ProductHunt. I didn’t make my own submission this time, instead Andrew Byrk did it. (Thanks Andrew!) This time, we got 73 upvotes and 938 visits out of it, which averages to only 12.85 visits per upvote. Evidently, people thought we were on to something. Although the absolute number of site visits was lower than the first go, we received many times more votes proportionally. Very interesting.
In February 2015, we reworked our product, added and removed some features, and relaunched as fatberry. On March 17th (today), we were ‘hunted. It’s still only the early morning as of this writing, but we’ve earned 34 votes and 239 referring site visits. Now, an average of just 7 site visits was all it took to get a vote!
I’ll admit, drawing conclusions from only three data points is statistically risky. Nonetheless, it’s really interesting to see a clear trend emerge. Conversion rate, as measured by the number of visits leading to votes, is going up and to the right, baby!
What do you take from it? What inferences can be made? Are we doing something different, or is the community evolving? Leave a note here, write a response, or tell me on Twitter.
Written by Greg Muender, cofounder of fatberry.
Greg on Twitter | Greg on Medium
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