Last Tuesday, we launched PDFShift on ProductHunt and finished #1. It has been an awesome - but tiring - journey, and we share everything with you here!
On September 6, we wrote an article sharing our strategy before our ProductHunt launch. It meant preparing a lot of emails to key people, crafting posts for our target communities, sending a massive email to our customer base, setting up the website and a few bits more.
Some worked like a charm, some … not at all. Today, we share this experience with you and the outcome from this.
Preparation
Since our previous post was about preparing a PH release, we thought it would be interesting to come back to it and share how it worked for us!
Sending a massive email to our customer base
Since PDFShift is not new, we had almost 1000 users on our database. Of course, not all of them are active users, but it was consequent enough to leverage that. As per the ProductHunt rule, we didn’t ask for upvotes but notified our users that we were live on ProductHunt.
From the 945 emails we sent, 36% of our users opened it (not that bad) and 9% clicked. This means 85 users went to see our ProductHunt profile. Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to know how many of them clicked on the upvote button, but it’s fair to assume that a good percentage of them did it (the difficult bit was done).
This is certainly the best technic we used that brought us many upvotes and helped us stay on top.
Your users are already converted, so they will be more inclined to help you since they know you are starting out and are generally happy to help.
Reaching out to communities
Communities can be of a tremendous help if done right. We tried a few of them, related to our target product or mindset, and got various results. Here are the messages we wrote:
- Indie Hackers: I’m featured on the front page of ProductHunt.
This post initially got 0 tractions and no one commented or upvoted it. I was hoping for more at the beginning but admitted my faith and forgot about it. I was surprised to discover that it got interest 5 hours later and gained 11 upvotes on IH, which gave me a fair amount of views (243)? - /r/growmybusiness : I’m #1 on Product Hunt — here is how I planned for it
Like IndieHacker’s post, it didn’t work well at the beginning but started getting traction later. I finished with 11 upvotes on Reddit (and no downvote!) and helped me get 898 views! - /r/ Entrepreneur: I’m #1 on ProductHunt today. Here’s how I prepared it.
Same here. It got a few interests, 7 upvotes on Reddit, and a few downvotes but got WAY more views => 2.1k views! - HackerNews: Ask HN: Helping a fellow entrepreneur out
This one failed miserably. I waited on that page for a moment and got nothing. I was expecting this coming from HackerNews; I never got any submission cross the “newest” page so it wasn’t a surprise.
Moreover, in the end, my post got flagged. I think it’s because I’m asking for help and it was not accepted by the community. My bad about it, I should’ve worked a bit more on it.
So the following day, I did a Show HN - PDFShift – An API to Convert HTML Documents to PDF, hoping to ride on the momentum from ProductHunt the day before, but that didn’t work either (got 2 points)
All in all, it’s difficult to say how many upvotes we got from all these posts but I’m pretty happy about the results we got from Reddit and IndieHacker!
Writing emails to key people
We sent about 7 emails to a few key people that could have been of great help on that day. All of them replied with awesome messages, a few of them shared the link with their network.
This strategy was the longest to prepare (one email per person, crafted specifically) with a “lower” return over time invested, but worth the work too as they all were really helpful and cheerful.
Implement a “We are on ProductHunt” banner.
We did something we haven’t talked on our previous post. We added a banner on the top of the website letting our visitors not coming from PH that we were on ProductHunt.
The decision to hide it from ProductHunt visitors was simply to not bother them with something they already knew about :)
Unfortunately, we haven’t thought to implement a click tracking on the link. That’s something we should have done in order to have a better understanding of how it worked. We learn from our mistakes, right?
But all in all, it’s still worth it, even without the stats. I’m pretty sure a few visitors clicked on the link and we got a few upvotes from them. All upvotes are worth it!
Trying the impossible
Yeah, we did something bold, but that didn’t work. (at least we tried …)
We … sent a tweet to Ryan Hoover:
Cyril N@cx42net
Hey @rrhoover, truth or dare? 9:14 AM - Sep 11, 2018
Hoping that first, he would reply, second, he would say “Dare”!
Then, we would have said something like “I dare you to mention PDFShift” or something.
Of course, that was bound to fail, but if he would have responded, we would have got a tremendous surge of people on our ProductHunt profile, and also a worth mentioning tactic for growth hackers ;)
Show me some stats!
Google Analytics
What was the result of being #1 on ProductHunt? We got a lot of visitors:
- 2450 users on Tuesday
- 1990 users on Wednesday
- 710 users on Thursday.
And a slow decline since then. We are averaging now at around 200 visitors per day, which is awesome!
Visitors => Users
Before our ProductHunt launch, we were averaging at about 10 new users per day.
On Tuesday, we got 70 new users, and 79 on Wednesday. Then, we dropped to 33. We are now averaging at about 20 new users per day.
Our plan is to keep that number high and try to convert more users to customers.
Users => Customers
Since we offer 250 conversions for free, many future customers first try PDFShift and see how to best implement it before becoming a paid customer.
For this reason, the benefits from being featured on ProductHunt doesn’t appear right away. It takes time to have a clear view of the conversion.
But we clearly got a conversion rate that has accelerated since before, so that’s great :)
Conversions
We easily doubled the number of conversions we do per day and peaked at 4000 conversions on Tuesday. The best thing about it was that our server worked like a charm and we didn’t have any crash related to the peak, so we are ready to expand more :)
Support
The main issue with a service like PDFShift is that the result depends a lot on how the CSS is structured when sent to our server. For this reason, we got a lot of users asking for help related to rendering issues.
These issues take time because we need to do the same tests and see what is wrong, find what to fix and share with them the solution.
We could easily just say “Your CSS is faulty, go change it”, but we believe that an awesome customer support is important, so we roll up our sleeves and do our best.
Since last week, we got 33 chat messages and 58 emails requests asking for help. This has occupied us for a long time and we are just starting to see the end of all those messages.
It takes time, it’s tiring, but it’s the best case scenario for us! I would definitely prefer this rather than having finished with one upvote on ProductHunt and no support request at all :)
Conclusion
It’s been a crazy two weeks experience for us. We spent a fair amount of time preparing our ProductHunt release and are psyched with the results. We finished #3 on Product of the week and closing on the thousands of upvotes!
Now, we need to keep that momentum going. We have tons of ideas to implement for PDFShift and need to keep working on the marketing side. It requires a lot of efforts, but we signed for this isn’t it? :)
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PS: If you haven’t upvoted PDFShift on ProductHunt, you still can and we really appreciate it! Thank you 👍