Our Experience Launching on Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a great place to show off your product, especially when you are launching. I’ve seen it grow from a side project of Ryan first introduced to me by Woosung a long time ago, all the way to the tech media prowess it has become today. We’ve been told by friends on how to use Product Hunt to gain good traffic, but we did not expect it to come so soon without a sign.
The Product Hunt Debut
Around 2am of January 11th, 2016, I received a phone call from Mark, our Head of Growth. “Did we launch on Product Hunt?” he asked. “Of course not. We’ll have to find someone to hunt for us with a big followers. Maybe tomorrow,” I replied, still rubbing my sleepy eyes not knowing what was going on.
He blurted out that we were on Product Hunt and someone had just mentioned me to say something about SendBird. My eyes widened and palms started to sweat. I knew was panicking. I’ve heard horror stories about how one could mess up a launch by not getting enough votes fast enough and blow the whole launch, and miss the single chance he gets.
I sprung out of my bed, flipped open my laptop, and scrolled through the Tech section of Product Hunt. Then there it was:
SendBird had originally been hunted by Kevin, Co-Founder at WalletKit, then Ben at Product Hunt had mentioned me. I knew what I had to do. I wrote my first reply as quickly as I could. Then I started messaging and mailing my friends to “take a look” at SendBird on Product Hunt. I was careful not to send out the direct linkto our product page, which would render the votes to become pretty much useless. I also mailed our batch mates on the program I was going through hoping they would check out our launch. It was … like 4am by then. I went to sleep around 5am when Mark took over and start responding to the questions.
Pushing Forward
By 10am, there were already quite a few winners on top of us and we were around 7th when I woke up. When I was at a dinner event for our program that night, I literally went from table to table asking the batch mates to checkout Product Hunt, giving free hugs to those who had already done so. I was saying hello to more people that night than I had in the entire last month. We fought our way to the top 5, ultimately ending at the 6th place for that day with more than 550 votes, the 2nd most voted product for that day. Checking today, we’ve received 610 votes!
I believe there were two primary reasons why we didn’t get in the top 5: 1) we were posted a bit early, so the velocity of votes relatively slowed down sooner and 2) people who “checked out” our product voted up prior to visiting our website.
It was a tough day, a hard fought battle. We also had posted on another site a few days earlier, but Product Hunt gave us the biggest bump on our site’s visitors to date:
The visits to our website spiked around 5 times the usual traffic. (*note that our Google Analytics is set to a different timezone, so it seems like the traffic evened throughout two days, but in PST, it was more like a single long day of spike)
The Spillover
To our pleasant surprise, we’ve been picked up on other websites likeStackshare.io and a few others, after Product Hunt launch. It seemed to have created a spill-over effect. The result wasn’t insanely huge, but it was definitely a great way to gain organic user growth. I have to admit, I love Stackshare!
We’re still the 2nd highest trending tools on Stackshare today. Both Product Hunt and Stackshare have been great sources of user acquisition since the bounce rate for both websites were quite low, compared to visitors coming from a targeted advertising campaign.
When we looked up other bigger software companies, we noticed they were launching many times on Product Hunt whenever there was a big update or a new product, so my guess is, we should be doing this a few times in the future as well.
All in all, Product Hunt is a great place to launch your product and we had a lot of fun doing so!
