What does a “normal” Product Hunt launch looks like ?
“How my product was the #1 upvoted on Product Hunt”. “How Product Hunt got me featured on TechCrunch, brought me 20k active paying users over the last 48 hours”. Those stories are all over the internet. While they are great to read and can be pretty inspiring for preparing a launch on Product Hunt, they do not represent the majority of project being posted. Here is our story of a “normal” launch on Product Hunt and what it taught us.
Last month, we launched the new version of Toolwatch.io (see what’s new here). While our initial launch was kept confidential to gather first feedback from early adopters, we wanted this new version to get more exposure so the idea of posting it on Product Hunt was a no-brainer. Being a niche product (we tend to prefer mechanical watches over smartwatches!) we knew we wouldn’t appeal to the majority of Product Hunters but we thought it was still worth the try.
We didn’t have a hunter account so I started looking for someone that had one and thought I should write an email to @jberrebi who was the most active of the people I was following and posted interesting product I enjoyed discovering. That’s what I did and I got a quick “yes” from him which was pretty cool! Thanks again Jeremie :)
We agreed on a launch at midnight pacific time on the 10th of July in order to get a full 24 hours of visibility on Product Hunt. While it can be more interesting for product that are aiming for the golden top 10 to be posted on a more limited amount of hours, we thought we would rather benefit from having one big day on Product Hunt.
Enough talk, let’s dive into the numbers! Our Product Hunt launch brought us :
• 3000+ new sessions
• 21.2% signup rate on these news sessions (pretty cool considering the fact that Product Hunters aren’t our #1 target)
• 700+ new measures of watch accuracy
• 100+ Twitter mentions (not as impressive as it seems considering the fact that it was actually a lot of bots doing a lot of noise…)
• A dozen of mentions in more specialized forums etc all around the world
• A few contacts with journalists
• Great feedback!
A month later, we still get some sessions coming from Product Hunt but nothing compared to the great rush of the first 24 hours. However, users coming from that channel are active users which we engaged with a lot and this is priceless!
Compared to Product Hunt’s well known success stories, our numbers may appear very small for some but as a niche product we feel like we did a decent job here and we would definitely think of Product Hunt when launching our new products. That being said, we might consider posting in the weekend when there is less competition. For product with a more narrow audience, this is in our opinion a better strategy. Also being part in a way of a community I respect is a cool feeling!
Thanks for reading me and I’d be happy to have your thoughts on “smaller” launches and if you have numbers to share. Feel free to reach out here or on Twitter and hit Recommend if you enjoyed the post. Thanks to @jberrebi for getting us started and all the Product Hunt team that were amazing during those 24 hours. And if you are a watch freak looking to measure the accuracy of your timepieces, see you now on Toolwatch.io!
