Analysing users’ behaviour after launching on Product Hunt
There are tones of articles on the web about how to launch your product on Product Hunt. There is even one official manual on PH blog, which actually was very helpful for my recent WebApp, The Weekr — a tool, which helps to organise recurring daily tasks.
However, this article is not about how to launch, it’s more about the impact Product Hunt makes, so you can make a clear picture whether it will work for you. I was tracking all the activity, so will try to show clear picture with graphs of what happened during and after.
FYI: four days before the launch on Product Hunt, I placed The Weekr on one of the platforms (stores) for Progressive Web Apps, which drove small traffic to me, but it shouldn’t make any difference for the whole picture. Besides, there was no other promotion/marketing done (which is not right if you want properly market your product).
Preparation before submission
To receive clear indication of interest for the product, I did a bit of preparation before launching. First of all, the concept of the product was picked to solve my own problem. Following advice from The Lean Startup & Mom Test books I understood that its worth testing of how many people actually have same problem and what qualitative feedback I can get from them. That will build a clear picture of what to do next.
First of all, I installed analytics (Google Analytincs in my case), which should go without saying for any product. Straight away I filtered out traffic from my IP, so my visits won’t be counted.
Secondly, I set up Google Tag Manager to monitor interest on existing features of the product (such as performance graph) and features which might be developed in the future (authentication, mobile apps). For the features which are not there yet there were some dummy buttons with a modal popping up with a form for email, see picture below.
Last, I added a simple feedback plugin, which in this case was Hotjar, so potential users could generate some thoughts and ideas about their experience of using product.
Submission
Submission date on Product Hunt was 7th of September and that’s the time when The Weekr started receiving main traffic. There was no promotion done, so all the users came organically. Surprisingly, with no marketing done outside Product Hunt, it was not the main source of users.
As you can see on the graph above, a week after launching on Product Hunt, there was huge increase in users. And that is one of the effects which occur after PH. The Weekr was picked up by other resources, in this case it was Dense Discovery — simple weekly tech newsletter.
After 1st of October (not shown on the picture) there were some smaller waves, when The Weekr appeared in one niche blog and in another newsletter.
After every main peak, for obvious reasons traffic started decreasing and now, two months after Product Hunt, Google Analytics shows 100–150 unique users visiting The Weekr every week. And I would consider these stats as the worse case scenario and for my believes, there are two main factors for that:
- There was no marketing or promotion done at all besides Product Hunt
- No features release (authentication was one of the most requested)
Analysing user data
As it was mentioned before, I used some technics to analyse user behaviour, receive feedback and understand what to do next. Besides the feedback from comments on Product Hunt, general upvotes (the product got featured, ended up to be ranked #7 product of the day), here are other important information I received:
- Almost 200 emails collected, which can be used for marketing purposes and indicates the interest in new features, such as cross-device authentication and mobile apps.
- Prioritisation in terms of features can be done by following clicks from Google Analytics Events
- More than 50 feedback forms filled with users’ impressions and comments (see example below). From that, it can be summed up that app requires better on-boarding tutorial and cross-device authentication.
Future
Now, after all of this done, it’s a time to understand whether this app will be used. Even though, it’s an open source project now, there are some ways of monetising it, some of similar products proved the work of freemium model.
Proper marketing outside of Product Hunt is one of the most important aspects to be done. There is a nice list of services which might be good for such products to market.
Implementing authentication feature will allow to collect more emails and improve statistics on returning visitors by doing email marketing. Improving on-boarding process and developing mobile applications are things to go next.
As always, happy to hear any feedback and thoughts about the product in comments :)
