600 Upvotes later: the Story of our Product Hunt Launch.
You’ve already been told Product Hunt is a great way to promote or launch your product. We have proof it’s true now!
Three weeks ago, we launched Birdly for Slack on Product Hunt. Here are our results, what we learned, why we’re thankful to the community, and why their team is amazing.
Our Product Hunt launch in numbers
Let’s get straight to results.
We’ve had 500 upvotes on launch day, and the number of supports has grown to 645 since.
During the launch week, we had 6,197 visits for 20,296 page views and onboarded a bit less than 200 teams out of which 110 can be directly attributable to Product Hunt. Each Slack team ranges from 1 to 350 people, with an average of 15 people in.
This is about what we aimed for, except we decided to add a pricing page the day before launch. So one thing’s sure, our registered users are mostly qualified, and a few of them already pay for the product even though their trial period is not finished.
As you could see on the chart above, there is obviously a slow down in the days following our launch, the “Product Hunt Effect” lasts a few days and the rest of the week thus accounts for half of our signups.
As our friends (and users!) from Wisembly wrote, Product Hunt sends different types of emails to its user base: Upvoted by Friends, Daily Newsletter and Weekly Newsletter. Product Hunt also sends a monthly recap of the most upvoted products each month. We didn’t make it to this one but we had the chance to be featured in the other newsletters, which generated a few more signups for us.
Another cool thing is the fact we reached people from tens of countries. Our network is mostly limited to France so that was an awesome way for us to be well-known all around the world.
Product Hunt also has ties with Twitter and the fact we launched on such a platform helped it become more viral. The launch day generated around 120 tweets with 60 links to the Product Hunt page, and I’m not even counting retweets nor faves.
Qualitative results
The overall feedback from the community was really positive. We have a very specific product, but people have been receptive and involved, both on Twitter and in the comments on Product Hunt.
Here are a few nice tweets about Birdly:
And some wonderful comments :)
Our tips to a successful launch
As we’re thankful to the PH community, we decided to pay it forward to other makers that may have a cool product to showcase, and give our humble tips to making their launch a success.
Keep Control of your launch: try as much as possible not to be hunted before it’s time and if such a thing happens, ask for removal to the PH team.
Prepare the launch with the Product Hunt team (if relevant): if it’s a paid product, you might offer an exclusive to product hunters. You can do so by contacting the team through this form . This what we did but the offer was finally not accepted (2 months free instead of one in our case).
Choose your hunter thoroughly, and if you don’t know one, ask the PH team : we wanted to have the best choice in terms of hunters, and when contacting PH for an exclusive, the team asked if we had a hunter. We had not and they thus chose one for us :)
Onboard users from Product Hunt with a custom message: even if our special offer wasn’t accepted by PH, we still sent it to them when they were coming for the website, with a banner with a special message and the Product Hunt logo. See ours here.
Beta Test your product and ship something people love: this is kinda obvious, but the two months of beta helped us having both a beautiful landing page and a product people loved, which helped us reach the top.
Ensure your tagline is the best: we had one tagline “Simple Expense Management for Slack Teams”, but felt like it wasn’t really obvious for people what we did. We took inspiration from other successful products hunted and decided to be more down-to-earth and chose “A Slack bot that does your Expense Reports” instead. It proved being more efficient and the A/B tests we did on our website confirmed the intuition.
Try to be hunted at midnight so you stay on page during 24 hours. We had the chance to be a European startup so we had a lot of people who knew Birdly already woken up by the time we were on PH. When the US woke up, we already had 200+ upvotes.
Tell your friends and network… on Twitter, Facebook, by email, newsletter if you have a user base, Slack…
…but NEVER ask for upvotes: we made it without asking for a single upvote. We just told people we were on Product Hunt. This must be your golden rule when you launch.
Don’t post/get posted on weekends: there are too few visitors on weekends. If you are confident enough, you better post during the week, Tuesday being our day of choice.
Answer comments: this is a no-brainer, but keep it in mind. We had wonderful comments and tried to be reactive that day.
Other factors to take into account: we were outpaced by Product Hunt Podcasts (❤) whereas it was posted 5 hours after us, because it seems velocity in the upvotes is important in the ranking as well. Also, try to avoid a big conference. We didn’t know Google was presenting the Chromecast 2 and the latest Nexus the same day until the day before launch. Hopefully it didn’t harm us, but y’all know how tech giants easily steal the show from smaller startups. One more thing: some products are great to launch on Product Hunt, some other aren’t and you may not get exceptional results. The core community may be less keen on upvoting purely B2B products for example.
In a nutshell, if you have an opportunity to launch a new product or service on Product Hunt, don’t think twice and go do it!
Special Thanks
We would like to thank a few people who helped us along the way. You guys rock!
- Eric Willis for accepting to hunt our product. If you don’t know Eric, he’s one of the top hunters on Product Hunt and he has been very involved in helping makers strive with their products.
- Ben Tossell, who’s part of the Product Hunt core team and helped us make this launch a success, accessing to all of our requests in a record time, and always with a smile.
- Jeff Morris Jr. for being kind enough to hunt us the first time. Sorry we had to ask for removal.
- Our beta users who supported us during the launch and left testimonials (we didn’t ask for!) in PH discussion.
- The whole community, who upvoted us, shared Birdly, registered and left us interesting and useful feedbacks, shaping the future of our Slack bot.
If you want to install Birdly for Slack, you can find us here!
Edit: We’re on Product Hunt again, this time with SlackStack :) — Thanks Bram
