I launched Pager Team on Product Hunt this past Monday. A lot of people have asked how it went. In this post I’ll answer that question, and share the steps I took before and after the launch. Why Product Hunt in the first place? Not only is it something I’m familiar with, but its audience is largely skewed towards technical people interested in small companies — precisely the type of customer Pager Team is a good fit for.
A brief history
Pager Team went live on February 28, 2019. On March 4th I started to tell my network (specifically meaning friends, family, and colleagues) about Pager Team. On March 6th I booked Chris Messina to post Pager Team on Product Hunt. He has a lovely calendar showing availability, and I picked March 18th because it was the first available Monday. My rationale was to get posted as early in the week as possible, to maximize exposure. Weekend launches come with less competition, but also less traffic. As a tool for businesses, I felt the weekday launch was a better strategy and I wanted to be as early in the week as I could.
Preparation and waiting
I used Preview Hunt to generate a preview of what the Product Hunt post would look like. More importantly, it’s a great way to make sure your copy complies with length limits.
I also put together a list of people who I thought would help me. I didn’t want to end up dead last so I wanted to make sure I’d get at least a few upvotes.
Then I went about continuing to iterate on Pager Team. I got lots and lots of feedback that the value proposition wasn’t being made clear by the original tagline, “On-call rotations without limits”. By the time launch day rolled around that had evolved into “Get system outage notifications the instant they occur”, largely thanks to Erik Karjaluoto who so kindly offers his insights from running a creative agency on officehours.io. The website tagline itself evolved into a rotating list starting with “Get system outage notifications” — the list is my way of targeting different audiences with the same tagline.
An aside on audiences: I view Pager Team as having multiple target customers:
- solo founders who need robust outage notifications but have no need for a rotation
- small teams who fit into Pager Duty/Opsgenie/VictorOps’ free or reduced-cost tiers (the new Pager Team cost comparison calculator takes all these into account; we still come out ahead in most — but not all — scenarios)
- medium teams (7+ engineers on a single rotation)
- larger organizations who need multiple rotations.
Right now I’m focusing my customer acquisition efforts on solo founders and small teams.
I also continued to make improvements to Pager Team itself. The biggest change was introducing consolidated billing: rather than getting one bill per rotation per month, customers get one bill every month for all rotations they own. (The person who creates a rotation is considered the owner and pays for it; other people on the rotation don’t.)
Launch Day
I stayed up until midnight pacific time to watch Pager Team’s post go live. I ended up staying up for almost an hour before getting a restless night of rest. In my mind one of the worst things that could happen was for the site to buckle under load, so I scaled up the Kubernetes cluster and increased the number of pods running Pager Team.
Results
All said and done, Pager Team ended up with 74 upvotes ending up in 22nd place out of 33 products.
246 users visited the site on Monday. This is a significant increase over the previous daily record of 13, but falls well short of a flood of traffic.
Pager Team has seen 2 user signups since Product Hunt.
Takeaways
Things that went well
My email went out at 12:01am on Monday morning to a list of 36 people. Rather than spam everyone in my address book (trust me I know when I receive one of those emails), I only picked people who I felt were in some way uniquely positioned to help.
Hi friends, family, former colleagues, people I barely know, and “how did this guy get my email address”,
As you may or may not know, I’ve been working on a startup for the past few months called Pager Team. It’s basically a product like Pager Duty, only better (for my objective definition of better).
To make a long story short, I need customers, and what better way to get customers than by putting it up on ProductHunt! If you don’t know, ProductHunt is a vote-based launch platform for products like Pager Team. If people like it and think the product has value, they vote it up. I’ve never done this before but I’ve read a lot about it :)
The thing is, every ProductHunt day starts at 12:01am PDT and early leaders get more upvotes simply by being on the front-page all day long. So if I can get Pager Team a boost now in the wee hours of the morning, I hopefully stand a good chance of being pretty high on today’s (Monday’s) list as people wake up / check the internet during lunch / surf the web after dinner / whatever.
So, if you could do me a favor? I’m not supposed to ask for votes outright, but go ahead and check out https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pager-team and if you feel so inclined please take the time to upvote. (You’ll need to create an account if you don’t already have one.)
I finished with a request that folks reply and let me know if they voted. Out of 36 people, 13 replied. (Since these 36 people will be reading this post, thank you for your support! I know some of you were on vacation, and I’m confident some of you helped and simply didn’t reply. Thank you all.) I’m immensely pleased with the 74 votes Pager Team received especially given the small distribution of my email.
I’m also super pleased with the early traction, from midnight through 1am. Pager Team placed as high as 4th (ignoring the sponsored listing).
This led to early traffic:
However as the day went on, Pager Team’s initial momentum faded as it dropped positions, and traffic dropped during course of the day. Overall, I’m satisfied with the amount of traffic Product Hunt brought to Pager Team. In the last 7 days, Pager Team has seen 413 users. Not having launched anything on Product Hunt before I wasn’t sure what to expect, though of course more traffic would have been even better.
Another datapoint I have as a result of all this traffic is the breakdown of desktop/mobile/tablet. Pager Team is a responsive website, and I’ve definitely paid attention to make sure things look okay on a mobile screen, but there hasn’t been a “mobile-first” approach and certainly no native apps. My rationalization for this approach has been that small business owners and developers are the target customers for Pager Team, and they would most often be on desktop. Well as it turns out, they are, 79% of the time.
Things I’d do differently
Most importantly I’d want to have spent more time investing in the landing page. I’d been getting about ten hits per day so I knew the site wasn’t converting at anywhere near 10%, but I’d like to have had a more solid figure on conversion rate (by “conversion” I mean someone who creates an account), and spent more time making the conversion rate as high as possible, to convert as much of the Product Hunt traffic as possible.
I’d also have launched around 8am PDT, instead of at midnight. Preview Hunt advises launch timing:
It’s recommended to launch around 00:01 San Francisco time to get maximum exposure
In aggregate, yes, it does maximize the amount of time your product is listed on Product Hunt. If you’re going to be that day’s top product, yes by all means get in early, win early, and keep winning. Take all the wins! However, it appears the ranking algorithm isn’t an absolute rank; instead there’s some “hotness” component. For instance, Pager Team with 74 votes is listed behind a number of products with vote counts in the 60s:
If I had to guess, it appears the frequency of votes counts significantly — if a product starts getting a lot of votes, it’ll start climbing. Since my distribution list was largely centered in the US, I can’t help but wonder if I shouldn’t have listed at some point in the morning instead.
Staying up to watch the launch, and the restless night of sleep that followed, meant I was poorly rested during the day. I’m not sure I would have done a whole lot differently, but at a minimum I totally forgot to share the Product Hunt link on a number of maker communities I’m part of until late in the afternoon.
Not having an established user-base to serve as a catalyst for initial Product Hunt upvotes. Many companies get some initial traction, then go to Product Hunt, using their existing users to get a boost. The risk with this approach is a more drawn-out initial traction phase which kills your morale, and if you do get traction, someone could hunt you when you’re not prepared (there’s no rule on Product Hunt that you can only submit your own product).
I would also have liked to have had a mechanism to capture some of the non-converting Product Hunt traffic. Maybe folks who didn’t want to sign up for an account would instead subscribe to a mailing list, or follow Pager Team on Twitter?
Why did I do all this?
The goal for Pager Team is to become a sustainable business. At a bare minimum, that means covering its expenses but the ideal outcome is covering living expenses for me, so I can continue to make it my full-time job. Right now the primary goal is to get enough traffic to the site to get better data about what resonates with prospective customers and what doesn’t, and of course to convert users into paying customers. I’ll talk about what Pager Team’s funnel looks like, but it doesn’t matter unless there’s something at the top to go through the funnel in the first place.
