Steps and Learnings from our viral launches on product hunt and hacker news
Last November, we released our open-source Customer Journey automation tool called Laudspeaker, site link here on Product Hunt. It was an exciting moment for our team because we received a lot of positive feedback and attention. Our tool ranked as the 2nd Product of the day and the 5th SaaS product of the week, and we had over 100 sign-ups to our site! Then, in late February, we launched on Hacker News and we managed to stay on the front page for almost 10 hours. It was a great experience for us, and we learned a lot from the whole process. If you're planning to launch your own product, we hope our experience can provide some helpful insights for you!
Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a great place to launch your app. For those who don't know, Product Hunt is a community-driven website where people can discover and showcase new products in the tech space. Launching your app on Product Hunt can help drive traffic to your website and increase your user base.
To create an effective Product Hunt page, we found a great Notion template that helped us get started. Although our product was not perfect, we engaged with early posters and comments for a few hours to ensure that every comment received some attention. We strategically planned our launch day to be on a Thursday, allowing us enough time to rise in the rankings before the weekend.
As a result of our launch, we received 140 sign-ups within a few days, 40% of which were using our app to complete the core action.
The Notion Template
We followed a notion template that was created by a friend of ours (if you’d like a copy, comment here, or send us a dm on twitter). It covers all your bases when it comes to planning a launch. It comes with a list of tasks. Each task has a simple explanation and can be assigned to any of your team members. The status is trackable. We focused on the must-have tasks, which were to create a high quality series of product pictures, a great thumbnail, a good description, and jumping in and responding to comments and questions for the first 30 minutes after launch.
Results
Product Hunt was very helpful for driving traffic to our site. Before we launched we had about 10 users using Laudspeaker. By the time we had climbed the Product Hunt leaderboards, we were looking at 140 sign ups - all within the space of a few days. Of those 140 sign ups, 40% were actually using our app trying to complete the core action!
Learnings
What did we learn from our Product Hunt launch? Product Hunt is a great place to drive traffic for SaaS products. Although our product wasn’t entirely ready at the time, we can’t deny that Product Hunt really pushed the numbers of users in our userbase. If you’re really serious about launching your SaaS app on Product Hunt, we’d recommend a consultant. In fact, make sure to comment below if you’d like a referral! The goal should be to make it to “Product of the Day” - that will give you a good shot of getting on the newsletter which gets sent out to the 1 million Product Hunt newsletter subscribers. That will ensure another boost in traffic.
Hacker News
Hacker News is another community-driven forum where tech enthusiasts go to find the latest and greatest in tech. The hacker news crowd is quite different to the product hunt folks, so when launching on Hacker News, be prepared for direct feedback in the comments section.
For our Hacker News launch, we prioritized engagement by replying to as many commenters as possible. We launched at 10 am EST to catch users on the East Coast, Europe, and the West Coast. Although our Hacker News launch generated similar traffic numbers to our website, we had fewer sign-ups. We also noticed that many Twitter accounts were boosting the Hacker News post, but this didn’t lead to more sign ups.
Results
While we saw fewer signs up and usage overall against product hunt, the usage we did see was higher quality and two main things happened, our [github] (https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker) stars increased from 260 stars to 604 stars over the weekend, and we started to receive inbound emails from potential customers.
Additionally, we saw an interesting discussion in the comments. The CEO of a competitor actually jumped in too! This is why you need to launch on Hacker News - the whole community is on there.
Learnings
Launching on Hacker News can be tougher, but it's worth it because it's a great platform to generate discussion around your app. Be prepared to engage with users and take their feedback on board. Don't be afraid of direct feedback, but make sure to respond in a friendly manner.
Post Launch Analysis
Our team had different objectives for each launch platform. With Product Hunt, our primary goal was to attract new users and encourage them to try our software. We successfully achieved this objective, with over 100 sign-ups and positive feedback from users.
On Hacker News, we aimed to drive traffic to our GitHub repository and gain more contributors. As an open-source platform, Laudspeaker will rely on user participation to improve its code. While we did see some user sign ups it wasn’t our main goal.
From our experience, we learned several important lessons for a successful launch:
- Engagement: Engaging with our audience was critical to our success. We provided a product that was in high demand and listened to feedback from our users.
- Clear Goals: Our goals were clearly communicated, and we had a clear Call-to-Action that directed users to our GitHub repository for hacker news and to our app sign up page for product hunt.
- Strike while the Iron is Hot!: When a product goes viral, it is essential to have the tools to sustain its success. Our team was able to capitalize on our successful launch by engaging with our new users and providing them with the support they needed.
- Analytics: We had analytics set up to track user activity, allowing us to analyze how users interacted with our software and make improvements for future launches.
- Post-Mortem Analysis: We conducted a post-mortem analysis to learn from our successes and failures. This analysis will be valuable for our future launches, allowing us to build on our strengths and improve in areas where we fell short.
If you’re interested in any resources to help you achieve the same results or better, comment here or feel free to reach out to us on Twitter!
