Product Hunt’s Impact on the Launch of GIFpitch
We’d been working on our GIFpitch iOS app for the past few weeks and after a few rounds of beta testing and approval by Apple we were ready to release it to the world.
If you’re not familiar with GIFpitch, it is our side project that lets you quickly and simply generate a shareable animated GIF file with your elevator pitch. It’s pretty simple — you login with Twitter, enter some information on a few screens, and then the app makes an animated GIF that you can share anywhere you share image files.
We released GIFpitch into the iOS App Store on Friday July 31st late in the day and we got a whopping 5 downloads (4 from China and 1 from the US). Since we’re a small indie team (Karl & Scott) we don’t really have a marketing budget and our ‘press release’ was this post on Hacker News that generated 7 upvotes. Little did we know that this Show HN post would lead to GIFpitch being featured on Product Hunt — one of the most important sites for surfacing new apps, products, sites, and more.
How GIFpitch Ended Up on Product Hunt
On Saturday August 1st at around 10:50am we got an amazing tweet from Corley at Product Hunt letting us know GIFpitch was on Product Hunt after being ‘hunted’ by Craig Deakin. We’ve never met Craig or worked with him in the past but it turns out that he saw our Show HN post and submitted GIFpitch to Product Hunt. In our opinion this is one of the coolest things about Product Hunt — people that have never met (and may never meet) can be connected solely by their passion to discover and share new things.
As soon as we found out that we were on Product Hunt and we were added as Makers we jumped into the conversation and started answering questions and getting great feedback from the Product Hunt community. In addition to the comments on Product Hunt we got a bunch of emails with ideas and suggestions — some of which have been implemented already and others that will be in a future update.
Feedback from PH Users
Our biggest suggestion was to add new ways to make your presentation stand out and we’re working on an update that will let users choose different fonts, change font size, text color, background color, and use images. This feedback was invaluable and it will help shape the future of GIFpitch to be more useful to our customers.
In addition to the feedback we got about how to improve GIFpitch, Product Hunt also showed a tangible increase in a variety of metrics. Here are the raw numbers and graphs showing the impact that Product Hunt had on our launch.
Product Hunt upvotes
From August 1st to August 6th GIFpitch has gotten 159 upvotes and is above the fold when searching Product Hunt for the term GIF.
Google Analytics
Guess when we showed up on Product Hunt? You can see the drastic increase in sessions on August 1st and since then we’ve experienced a decent uptick in traffic each day. Of all of the 2,637 users that ended up on the GIFpitch landing page 95% have been new users since hitting the featured page on PH last week.
GIFpitch Downloads
Although it’s tough to compare the number of downloads pre-PH since the app was only available on July 31st for a few hours you can see the bump in downloads when appearing on the Product Hunt homepage with almost 130 downloads on August 1st. Over the new few weeks we will see what type of sustainable download count GIFpitch achieves.
Business Insider
Finally (and probably the thing that made our parents most proud) was that an article about GIFpitch appeared in Business Insider that included a picture of Mariano Rivera who is arguably one of the best baseball pitchers of all time.
What’s Next?
We had plenty of ideas on where to take GIFpitch before we ended up on Product Hunt and some of these ideas we believed in were confirmed and we got plenty of new thoughts on where to take GIFpitch.
In the next few days you will see a minor release with bug fixes and minor features (like private pitches) and then we will be releasing the next update that lets you customize your pitch much more than you can now.
We’d love to hear more feedback on what you think about GIFpitch and what else you’d like to see it do. Please reach out to us on Twitter @716labs to talk about GIFpitch or anything else — we’re always around and open to chat.
Our experience with Product Hunt has been amazing and the community is what really makes it most valuable. The amount of open feedback, constructive criticism, and support that we’ve gotten has been overwhelming — all we can say is thank you!
716 Labs is an indie app development studio run by Karl and Scott. Feel free to contact us if you’d like to discuss this article, any of our apps, or anything regarding iOS app development.
