From 8 to over 450 Customers In Less Than 96 Hours
Even when you may know it’s coming, the sweet sound of your iPhone buzzing with push notifications from wake you out of a shallow slumber(because, who can fall asleep when you know your launch story is about to show up for the whole world to see?)
I’d like to summarize my experiences and lessons learned from my recent launch on Lifehacker.com and ProductHunt.com. Without further ado, a screen cap from Google Analytics:
I realize those numbers are probably modest at best and tons of similar products and press scenarios will blow StandupTime’s numbers out the window, but I feel overall the experience was positive.
If you build it, they won’t just show up
Having spent a little over half the year in the ‘lab’, a few months of beta and a soft launch, there were only a handful of customers who have signed up. However, this was a valuable time to craft StandupTime into a Daily Standup tool that helps solve real business problems.
Leading up to this weeks press, the web traffic to StandupTime was pretty abysmal. Traffic would not really break 20 visitors a day and was practically dead on the weekends
You can’t just sit back!
Armed with a fairly developed web application, a few minutes of blog traffic the past month, and a refined landing page I was ready to go out and reach out to the press and Product Hunt.
During my competition analysis, I had discovered that a competitor(whose app has since disappeared) had been featured on TheNextWeb and LifeHacker. Perfect, I thought to myself, let’s try and reach out and see if they would like to write about StandupTime. Armed with a Press Release and Press Kit, I had emailed both TheNextWeb and LifeHacker. Days had gone by without any response until I suddenly received a response from LifeHacker requesting high-resolution images to use for an article. JACKPOT!
A few days of back and forth and I got a concrete date for the article, Sunday, September 6th, which leads me into Product Hunt. I had previously built a relationship with a Hunter and Maker who enjoyed a few of my past blog posts(re: content still matters!). I asked to be hunted and schedule to be on ProductHunt on Monday, the 7th.
Go Time!
With a vague ‘morning’ article release from LifeHacker, I was somewhat anxious to see when the traffic would hit. I was a little unsure how much traffic I would get at once, but I had load tested my static website’s server to over 2500 simultaneous users without any issue.
At exactly 7:04(not like I was refreshing all morning) Arizona Time(Arizona doesn’t use DST), the article went live. The moment when you notice it goes live and Slack starts pinging you about new users signing up is thrilling! The site was averaging about 60 concurrent users for the first few hours and tapered off steadily throughout the day. By midnight, Google Analytics had registered 2370 page views. This resulted to about 140 new customers, as well.
Keeping the Momentum Going!
Catching an hour or two of sleep between 10 PM and 12 AM, I awoke to the a notification that I had been hunted on Product Hunt! Having read many articles and PDFs about being hunted, I was ready to go. I followed back each of my up voters and responded to comments on the hunt. There were only 3 comments that were not mine and responded to each. A user even found an issue with StandupTime’s landing page on iOS that I was able to quickly fix.
After all was said and done, Monday ended with 3171 page views with 38% direct(I believe that one of Product Hunts links did not register as a referral in my analytics), 33% Product Hunt and still got 17% of the traffic from LifeHacker. Although the traffic was a little higher, the sign ups still ended up around 140 new customers. Additionally I ended the day with around 90 uproots and in 6th place for the day. This was not as high as I hoped, but I still felt it was well for a B2B web app.
Tuesday was a busy day as well, being the first day back to work for most Americans after the Labor day Holiday. The traffic was down a considerable amount to just over 1100 page views but had a much higher conversion rate at a tad over 100 new signups.
At the time of writing this post, I have surpassed 450 new signups!
Was it worth it?
As a new entrepreneur, with a new application into a mostly existing niche B2B market, you quickly learn it is all a numbers game. You don’t magically deploy your application to production and start getting 5 figures in monthly revenue. The more eyes you get on your landing page, the more you convert into trials or free users, the more you convert into paid users…and the more revenue you can generate.
I generally believe that 1 is better than zero and am grateful for the opportunity that I was presented with to get my web application out there in front of thousands of people. Could I have gotten more Product Hunt upvotes? Maybe. It’s hard to know what your real upvote potential for any given day, for a B2B application.
Well, What Now?
Now I am onboarding those who have signed up, personally following up with active and influential signups. I will most likely start an automated email campaign for the remaining free users to get them going and point out benefits they may be able to use on paid plans.
Product Hunt is still showing a considerable small stream of traffic and a few signups. The plan going for is to keep up the hustle, get more clients onto StandupTime and delight them with the app!
