Slipping on Product Hunt from 4th to 6th - what happened with us from start?
On 3rd April, we launched on Product Hunt. So, this post is not to ask for votes anymore. This post intends to inform new saas founders thinking of launching on PH about various intricacies happening in the background.
Having an experience with 2 past launches, I knew there is a very low ROI for my B2B product here on PH.
I tend to think of PH as a place that might get you quick user signups for a B2C product or a quick time-to-value product. Our's was not that.
Hence, this time, I didn't spend much time to this launch, 1 day, and that was it.
I created a Slack canvas, a table that contained the information required to be filled with the launch information + assets.
Then I scheduled it for 3rd April. This was 4-5 days back from the scheduled date.
What happens next?
On LinkedIn, I started getting messages from some self-proclaimed LinkedIn influencers teaching me why ranking on #1 is so much important, along with how they can get me there.
Prices ranged from $80 to $300.
One important thing to mention here is that they try to trap you on the name of their number of followers on LinkedIn.
However, the number of followers on LinkedIn is a very vague metric because until a certain point (like 30k), whenever you send someone a connect request, and they accept it, you both start following each other automatically. I don't know why LinkedIn have this.
Anyways, coming to my point, so these offers seem very lucrative because with a user base of 50k, even at 1% conservative conversion rate, you would have around 500 upvotes, which I would say would be enough to be in the top 3 easily.
However, here's the catch.
When I asked those influencers how many upvotes you guarantee, they all sang in a similar tone. That they can't guarantee upvotes, however, with such a large following, they expected that, you can easily get around 30-50 upvotes. A heavy expectation, I guess.
What a shame, with such a following.
Anyways, coming to the launch day, the product was scheduled for launch at 12:30 IST, and I was ready.
@12:30 - didn't went live
@12:31 - didn't went live
@12:35 - didn't went live
@12:40 - didn't went live
It was chaos. The whole team was sitting on a call waiting for the product to go live. But it didn't.
Debugging wasn't an option. As our priority was to just get that live somehow.
We had to manually push the product to go live 2-3 times, then it went ahead.
Finally our product went live at around 12:45, 15 minutes behind schedule, which was fine.
Comes the distribution part.
We had our customers, Slack, and email broadcasts were sent. I somehow received a list of 100 more of our users, who were not our paid customers, but they had signed up on our platform, but not activated.
It was on that day only.
I think working in a notifications company had its own benefit. Our platform supports broadcasts on all messaging channels such as email, SMS, slack, WhatsApp, push and more.
All I had to do was
- upload the CSV list
- create a template using the drag-and-drop template builder
and in less than 2 minutes literally, I sent a full-fledged blast on WhatsApp channel to these users as well. Here's what you see and get.
Incase you want to send broadcasts to a long list of users, either on email, WhatsApp, SMS, push or any channel, just use our simple upload CSV--> broadcast feature. It would be done in minutes, literally.
Afterwards it was all about sending the notifications to our users, asking them to help us.
In the initial 4 hours, where the number of votes are hidden and the product is shuffled on PH, we were visible on the 1st page. After the 4 hours, we were there on the 4th rank.
Then the value of comments started kicking in.
It gave us almost a similar visibility as the top ones, so traffic came to our website.
We got around 500 visitors till now from that launch. Around 4-5 signups from individual contributors.
Other products above us did seem to have a community of upvotes. They must have prepared for that, and they did win.
This PH launch didn't affect our revenue, the same as the last time. It did bring in the traffic, as expected.
But for a B2B product, especially for someone like us, where the time-to-value is quite long since we are a notifications infrastructure, I don't think PH would make sense other than having a top-of-mind awareness.
If you are a B2C product with single-session, quick time-to-value, do go ahead for the launch. You would get users, now whether those users would be paid ones, that, time would tell.
For what we prepared, it was a good launch, with visibility as our metric. Anyways, if you would want to check our profiles, do see below.
Do ask your questions.
