How Entro Landed in ProductHunt’s Top 5

Published in

The Launchism

5 min readMar 8, 2016

On February 3, 2016, Entro, an email introduction extension, launched on ProductHunt. While we had a late start in the morning, we left feeling pretty satisfied. But first, let’s back up a bit.

Entro is the holy grail of email introductions (seriously, that’s our tagline).

It’s is an email extension that gets rid of awkward single opt-in introductions and speeds up double opt-in introductions. Our newest feature lets you save intros and follow up right from your compose window by simply including the word ‘intro’ in the subject line. Basically, we make introductions smoother and professional/personal networking easier. I used to belong to the dark side, doing cold calls. Eventually, I decided that it wasn’t the path for me and started solely in warm introductions. Thus, Entro was born.

Now that you know a little about our product, here’s the story about how we launched on ProductHunt.

Pre Launch

We had a lot of work to do before our big day. To prepare, I obsessively read about how to get into the top three products of ProductHunt. I scoured GrowthHackers for tips on how to maximize the success of our launch, and I encourage everyone to do the same! This was integral to our successful launch. Read every article you can; GrowthHackers is a great way to improve your marketing toolbox and find ways to spread your ideas.

I also used my social circles to my advantage before the launch day. I made sure that all my friends and family knew so that they could show their support by upvoting or spreading it around on social media.

Protip: Don’t ask for upvotes specifically or link directly to your product when sharing because it’s against ProductHunt’s terms of service.

Launch Day

I woke up at 5am. Early bird gets the worm, right? Alas, there were earlier birds and by the time we were up and going, we were sitting right at the bottom by a large margin. I started messaging my friends on the east coast, where it was 8am, and asking them to help out with some support. Personalized Facebook messages are the fastest/best way to get a lot of votes and start picking up steam.

At 8am, I started hitting up friends on the west coast and asking them for support. When 9am rolled around, I hit up batch 9's 500 Startups FB Group, where I have a lot of relationships, and asked them to support a previous batchie! Then I posted in the 500 Startups dashboard where the community helps each other on all sorts of startups issues so it brought even broader awareness to the product and more votes!

Later on, we started contacting influencers. This is where we hit the jackpot. Influencers are people who are well-known and respected, so when they started showing their support people followed suit. Those upvotes carried the most weight and helped us make progress. One of these influencers was John Corcoran, who helped us coin our tagline (“the holy grail of email introductions”) and is an expert at dealing with Very Important People. John Corcoran’s articles helped us a lot during Entro’s formative months and even now.

At noon, it was time to get coffee as the adrenaline wore off. But more importantly, we made it into the top five! This is important because ProductHunt only features the top five products on the landing page, so it ends up being a winner takes all game. To see the rest of the products, users need to make an extra click. In other words, being #5 is infinitely better than being #6. As we pull ahead by 30 or 40 votes, it becomes clear that #6 isn’t going to catch up. I am elated and proud that our hard work has paid off. Here are some statistics that show how much this ProductHunt launch allowed us to reach new audiences.

As you can see, 94% of our new sessions were from new visitors and we garnered over 4,042 page views. Our bounce rate was at a minuscule 0.29%. However, there’s always more work to be done.

Things We Did Well

I made an effort to answer all the compliments and feedback we got. This is something I learned from Gary Vaynerchuk’s “The Thank You Economy,” which highlights how important it is to listen to people’s feedback and make it known that their opinion matters. Interacting with your audience helps them feel more on board. Respond to as many comments as you can; plus, you get great constructive feedback.

Nimble, our CRM, also helped a ton with our launch. It has all of my contacts who I was able to mark as “important” for Entro and ProductHunt so I knew to contact them on our launch day because I had them saved in Nimble. Instead of sifting through my contact list and trying to figure out who might give us an upvote, I was able to reach a target audience with a few clicks. These were also more likely to be influencers so their votes mattered more to PH’s algorithm.

Mistakes We Made

Design matters. We featured an okay gif, but it wasn’t the best. ProductHunt handpicked some more aesthetically pleasing products, and our subpar gif may have factored into us not getting picked. When it comes to which products make it big, sometimes the tiniest details can make the biggest difference.

However, we ended the day feeling proud of Entro and how far it had come. We had a late start but came through when it counted. TL;DR? We came, we saw, we conquered (but next time we’ll do better).

Special Thanks

Our company and our product have come a long way since its conception, but we couldn’t have done it alone and still have so much to do. Thanks to Sukhvir Kushwah, all my friends, roommates, girlfriend, family, and most importantly — my parents. Here are some people who have helped us with the product along the way and I'm looking forward to building a special company with:

Don’t be late for the party, start connecting with Entro