Don’t bet the farm on ProductHunt.

The front page of ProductHunt got us hundreds of users but we couldn’t deliver an awesome experience.

A wild Sunsama appears on ProductHunt!

Team Sunsama was heading to bed when I saw a twitter notification. Someone just posted us on ProductHunt. Within minutes new users started pouring into Sunsama.

Sunsama stayed on the front page of ProductHunt for 24 hours! We ended up with tens of thousands of page views across our app and hundreds of new users despite the high barrier of entry to joining Sunsama. We actually ask users to link their calendars so we can find good times for conversations. ProductHunt delivered on its promise of getting us serious exposure and a lot of signups.

ProductHunt users: Early Users or Early Viewers?

There was a noticeable drop-off in day one engagement with our new ProductHunt users. Certainly Sunsama could be more engaging and we’re working hard on that at HQ. But why did our engagement levels drop without any product changes? We’ve got a few hypotheses:

1. ProductHunt is a buffet. ProductHunters check out products for the sake of checking them out. They’re not necessarily interested in becoming true users. They are interested in becoming early adopters. It will take more time to assess this.
2. Sunsama is a social network. Signing up and engaging in a social network is more valuable when people you know are also signed up. ProductHunt is an international community of people who like checking out Products. Almost everyone who joined Sunsama before the ProductHunters knew upwards of 10 other people on Sunsama.
3. Organic users that joined before ProductHunt had at least one amazing experience with our product first. Looking at the Sunsama home page is not an awesome experience. In fact, it’s not an experience at all its our home page. Every non-ProductHunt user enjoyed one of three memorable experiences: they scheduled a conversation with a Sunsama user, a Sunsama user invited them to join as part of their trusted network, or someone at Sunsama HQ convinced them to join.

Every non-ProductHunt user had one amazing experience on Sunsama before joining. ProductHunters just saw our home page.

What we learned

1. Don’t build your user acquisition strategy around ProductHunt.
2. Acquire users through experiences not channels.

We hadn’t expected to show up on ProductHunt so it was a nice bonus that reinforced the fact that the best way to grow Sunsama will be by providing our early users with great experiences!

I can now proudly proclaim myself a member of the “I wrote a Medium post about my startup’s ProductHunt experience” club. I’ll write more once we’ve collected more usage data about our ProductHunt experience. For now I give you purely qualitative thoughts.

We write to share our thoughts. We talk to create experiences. If you want to discuss anything I wrote here, share your ProductHunt learnings, or just rage at me for my inane thoughts you can snag some of my time here on Sunsama. I’ve made it publicly available so feel free to chat even if you’re a stranger!