This guy finally found a way to harness the full potential of Product Hunt
One month ago I launched MailPort on Product Hunt. MailPort is a side project I’m working on, enabling Marketers to connect their Facebook Page’s Messenger account to email based Marketing tools.
This was the 9th time I was launching a product on Product Hunt and so far my most successful launch. As someone doing startups for more than 7 years, there are plenty of things I learned, especially a lot of ways of how not to approach things. This is one of the reasons I decided to share all promotion approaches, numbers and learnings with MailPort publicly.
Usually before launching on Product Hunt I was doing quite some preparation, like asking people beforehand if they can upvote us or ask a question we had prepared. Even though this approach is often referred to as “best practice”, it’s not.
So this time I tried something different without begging my friends and network:
Using Product Hunt for real feedback
Yeah, that’s right. Feedback. From real users. I didn’t ask my friends to upvote my product, I didn’t try to generate a fake hype around it, I didn’t answer fake questions I prepared by myself, I didn’t try to trick an algorithm by faking interaction. I only had one goal: get real feedback from real users. The only thing which mattered to me was finding early users who were willing to give my product a try, providing me with feedback so I can learn from it and build a product which people want and need.
Through the Product Hunt submission I got quite some people who were interested in giving it a try and one of the first learnings was that I need some kind of help section. Even though most users understood the concept of this tool, they had quite some trouble understanding of how it actually works behind the scenes. This let me to create the MailPort Help section.
After providing a getting started guide and a way to contact me, I got a quite interesting idea from one of my early users to create a Facebook community where people can ask questions, find answers and support each other.
KPIs since launch
- Signups: 243
- Finished Signup Flow (connected a Facebook Page and MailChimp): 45.27% (110)
- Connected Facebook Pages: 43.62% (106)
- Activated users (Facebook Pages with active subscribers): 10.70% (26)
- Paying Customers: 0 (currently no payment implemented)
In March I’ll try a few different promotion activities to generate more signups, implement payment and (hopefully) convert the first users to paying customers.
