Last week, we launched Solid on Product Hunt. The result met -and exceeded- our expectations. Numbers, graphs, and lessons learned, here’s what Product Hunt did for Solid.
Traffic and Signups: look beyond launch day
On launch day, we got 606 signups attribuable to Product Hunt. This number, although quite satisfactory, is dwarfed by the analysis of the full week where Product Hunt brought us 2,173 signups.
Yes, even if the traffic and conversions slow down after launch day, the Product Hunt effect stays for a while. I attribute this to the newsletters sent by PH, which caused notable activity spikes.
Here are the 3 types of emails Product Hunt sent which contained Solid:
- Upvoted by friends - you receive this when people you’re linked with on Twitter upvote a product, sent on launch day
- Daily newsletter - list of most upvoted product for the day, sent the next day
- Weekly newsletter - list of most upvoted products for the week, sent at the end of the week
So, it’s pretty important to kill it on launch day in order to appear in these emails. Without them, we probably would’ve had half these results. That’s a rough estimate, coming from the fact that Direct traffic (that I mostly attribute to newsletters) was equal to Product Hunt’s referral traffic throughout the week.
Overall, we had a conversion rate of 22% from Product Hunt referrals (website + newsletters). A 10% increase.
I spend 21 hours a week in meetings. Learn about your meeting habits: https://t.co/XSnplHstYp
— Liam Boogar (@LiamBoogar) September 14, 2015
The ripple effect
Being featured on Product Hunt puts you on the radar of tech savvy people. A few users wrote their first impressions about our app, some publications picked up the news… Put together, referral traffic increased by 624% the week of the launch. This is the shiny number, but I much prefer the 214% increase in referral traffic between Thursday, Sept 8 (normal day, pre-ProductHunt craze) and yesterday, Thursday, Sept 22 (normal day, post-ProductHunt craze). Temporary spikes are nice, but I’ll take sustained growth over them.
Engaged users
This looks like a very cool tool to help make meetings less painful and more productive > https://t.co/BVdUdCu30U
— Adam Barty (@adam_barty) September 16, 2015
Onboarding new users is very cool. Onboarding users who actually engage with your product and find value in it is cooler. We have a Slack community for Solid that our most engaged users join if they feel like it. There, we listen to our their ideas and we show them mockups and prototypes of what’s to come. This community grew by 50% in one week of Product Hunt craziness.
What’s even better is the sheer amount of feature requests we managed to collect, and bugs we managed to fix in the course of the past week. We actually improved our customer support and internal communications by a large margin thanks to Intercom. That’ll probably be worth another article.
Some humble tips
You probably know most of the dos and don’ts of Product Hunt, here’s what we did:
- Contact a hunter - we went with @bramk, and would do it again in a heartbeat
- Have a custom page for people coming from Product Hunt - we used Introbar, free, easy solution
- Share the news with all your contacts. If you already have users, it helps as well.
- Remember not to ask for upvotes - Just spread the news of your launch with a link to producthunt.com, no need to pressure people into voting
If you do all this, you should be all set.
Also consider what day you’ll launch. Obviously avoid big other tech events: you don’t want to compete with an Apple keynote. One more thing: I certainly don’t want to make our example a generality, but launching on a Monday did wonders for us. There weren’t many other products posted on that day. So it took about an hour to get to the number one spot, and we stayed there for most of the day until Stripe Relay was posted, and caught up on us right before the day closed.
Wrapping it up
I’d like to thank everyone who upvoted, commented and shared the Solid story during the launch, and our terrific users. You really helped make this launch special and we couldn’t be more thankful! If you have questions, you can direct them to me (@thibautdavoult), I’ll be happy to answer them.
Best of luck on your own launch!
Want to run better meetings? Solid might be the perfect match for you 