Aftermath of our disappointing Product Hunt launch 🤦♂️
I promised to share an aftermath of our ProductHunt launch, so here it is.
1. Preparation for the launch
- Managed to get hunted by a „big” hunter (over 12 000 followers on Product Hunt)
- Changed our pricing 1 day before the launch (added a free plan and lowered prices)
- Redesigned our website including images and copywriting
- Wrote all texts recommended by ProductHunt, including the first comment
- Prepared good-looking images for PH to show our product
- Prepared all posts about the launch that we wanted to publish on the launch day
- Asked our friends for support on Product Hunt that day
- Prepared an email to our current users to let them know we are live on Product Hunt
- Tweeted about the upcoming launch and asked for support
Our to-do list for the launch day
- Embed a ProductHunt launch badge
- Remind our friends to support the launch
- Publish the post on IndieHackers
- Send the email to our current users
- Publish a post on HackerNews: Show HN
- Tweet a lot
- Email people from our waiting list (Ship page on Product Hunt)
- Publish posts on r/SaaS, r/Entrepreneur and r/new_product_launch
2. Launch day
- We were sitting in front of computers 30 minutes before the launch. The launch was scheduled for 12:01 a.m. PST.
- The goal was to be as close to the top as possible in the first hour.
- We did most of the things from our to-do list in the first 20 minutes & managed to stay in top 3 during that time. Later during the day things started to look worse.
- We were answering each comment as soon as possible.
- We were up until late at night.
- My co-founder woke ap at 3 a.m. and I got up at 7 a.m. (2 hours before the launch day ended) to answer some more comments.
- Eventually we ended up being #8 product of the day which we see as our failure.
3. What worked and what didn't work for us
What worked
- We took action really quick, and we were well-prepared
- Twitter. We managed to gain some followers since November. I actually crossed 100 during the launch. Some of my followers are really supportive and active and I also gained some new followers who are genuinely interested in Raport. My tweets got quite a lot of retweets, likes, and comments.
- Our friends and family helped us by upvoting and commenting.
What didn't work
- Post on HackerNews. This is not an easy audience to impress, and we failed to do that. The idea was to show our main page and hope that visitors will notice the Product Hunt badge and support the launch.
- My post on IndieHackers didn’t get to the front page until late at night, even though it had 7 upvotes. This resulted in very few views and probably didn’t help the launch.
- We launched on Tuesday which is said to be a competitive day.
- Getting hunted by the „big” hunter. I thought it would make a significant difference but didn’t help at all.
What was weird
- A Youtube Video Download API came out of nowhere and got to #2. It also had 50 upvotes taken away at some point so must have been cheating. But the product probably still benefited from being at such a high position and got some more organic upvotes. Also, a lot of the comments they had looked fake. I think PH should punish this type of cheating more, not just by cutting the upvotes that were bought.
- There was 1 Web3 project and it got little upvotes. That’s very surprising.
Learnings
- Having a community such as Twitter followers can make a significant difference. And I believe Twitter is the best from what we had. I don’t use LinkedIn yet, but I think I should start. The reason I’m not using it, is because I have a feeling that it’s for more established businesses, not a bootstrapped $0 MRR SaaS.
- Being well-prepared is very important for the launch day.
- Maybe it would be better if we did things from our to-do-list throughout the day, and not everything at once. This way we could have upvotes coming in all day.
- It may be good to find more channels to promote the launch.
Stats
- 564 Visits from PH (25th + 26th January)
- 56 signups (25th + 26th January)
- Interesting cooperation proposal from a Marketplace
- Appeared in the PH Newsletter
Summary
We are disappointed with the result. We really wanted to be in TOP3. Maybe we should have chosen a less competitive day. We got almost 2x less visits than with our previous launch but at the same time, more signups.
Now the challenge is to convert some of those who signed up to paying customers. And we need to keep new signups coming. Product Hunt was an easy way to get new users. Time to get back to hustling.
Trending on Indie Hackers
Remember. Product Hunt is a channel, not a strategy.
I'm sorry to hear that the launch was disappointing... But I think you've created value out of your disappointment with this post! So it wasn't all bad!
Do you intend to do repeated PH launches after the required 6-month interval has passed? It seems like that would give you an opportunity to hone your launch and apply your learnings, too.
Thank you, I knew I will need to get back to publishing posts to keep the marketing of Raport going. So that's the first post after the launch and I'm glad it got so much attention.
I didn't know that you can relaunch after 6 months. I thought you need to make some significant changes to the product to be able to relaunch. If what you said is the case, then we will definitely launch again ofter 6 months. Thank you for sharing that information with me!
You are correct, you do have to make some significant changes. (https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/484934-can-i-re-post-a-product-that-s-already-been-posted).
Ok so there are 2 things to do. Wait and improve :) Thank you once again. And I'm sure we will launch again.
I run a logo maker website. I spent a lot of time ProductHunt last year but then I found that the users on PH are not likely to be my customers.
Bootstrapping a startup is not easy, feeding yourself and the team is more important than anything, so focus more on where you can get customers.
True. I think we didn't spend too much time but we believed in PH too much. I know that buying an Upcoming Product (Ship) subscription for a month wasn't worth the money.
Now it's definitely time to focus on other marketing channels. I believe the top ones are: writing posts, SEO and Twitter.
Focus more on SEO and see your growth. It takes time...but, totally worth it! :)
I will split my time between different marketing activities but I know that SEO is one of the best. It just takes time to kick in. But you know best, you're an SEO expert!
Yeah
PH is overrated, I Have launched many times, half of them within the first 5 position including 1 and two.
Some of these launches weren't planned by any means and soon as I launched I went to work or to work on another of my side projects.
Of course, I did answer and checked for comments to answer but..... PH is not worth your stress.
Here is my profile as a proof.
Thank you for sharing that. You're a real serial maker 😅
You had some great result (at least in terms of numbers on PH). How did they impact your products? Did you get a satisfying amount of traffic and signups?
From the tone of your reply, it seems that maybe not but I'm still curious.
Well, the only paid product is www.wickedtemplates.com and the launch day we made around 2k.
Traffic was fine, but not a big deal.
Producthunt is overrated. by 10x
I'm familiar with WickedTemplates. 2k revenue sounds really good. Nevertheless, I get your point Michael
Except it's encouraged. Bot votes documented here several times and what happens to bot accounts; They remove the votes after a while but accounts still remain. Which ease the job of bot owners while portraying activity.
Instead they make it harder for developers to expose it, their API no longer returns who voted for what. They can put any number they want and there is no direct way to confirm the actual votes count.
It seems you get away with $10 while that hunter charges $150 for 30 min zoom call :) for such great advises on a product launch. That might be what's missing here.
It just saddens to see many indiehackers promoting producthunt as part as their marketing.
Yikes, I had no clue they don't remove these accounts. What's more if there remove the fake upvotes late enough then the product has already benefitted from the visibility and organic votes keep coming in.
I am also finding out about this Product hunt advice feature for the first time.
We have launched two products on PH and plan to launch 4 more which are subsidiary products to the main one in the coming two months. It would be so sad to watch cheaters take the rank since it takes so much time and effort to plan these things.
I didn't know that they're just leaving the bot accounts there. That's not right.
So you think we should make a call with him? Maybe it could be worth it but generally speaking, being an early-stage bootstrapped business, you count each $.
I think it's quite understandable. Launching on Product Hunt is relatively easy user-acquisition. The problem is that some products are visibly cheating and PH does too little to stop that.
I think there should be a more transparent and reliable solution. No one should pay for a consulting session for an arbitrarily blown platform.
I'm not encouraging this but https://www.fiverr.com/reddit_a/promote-your-product-hunt-post-24-hour you can see the frequency of recommendations. And those are just the ones who cares to write. A single bot owner has 2 orders in queue and there are several more on fiverr and similar sites. That's how PH operates.
Now that I've noticed those who paid for a consulting session had a better result even tho it doesn't makes sense. And knowing ph doesn't delete bots instead tries to hide it. I'm more inclined to think that's how they wanted things to be.
Considering how much money they generate through ads, it shouldn't be so hard to send a few thousand clicks to those sites maybe with a few random purchases, sign-ups. Wouldn't hurt their budget while keeping everyone happy.
Ok, now I understand your point. I think you are right. I may dive a bit deeper into this subject but it seems like PH is just pretending to fight with the bots.
Enjoy your dive but I wouldn't recommend since it's a dead-end.
Even if you find out every part is a scam, it works for everyone. PH is happy due to increased activity, makers are happy due to more visibility, visitors are happy thinking they are keeping up with the trends. There is no way to convince people to be apart from this circle.
It's allowed to get paid for hunting. It's already an encouragement for manipulation. I can be a marketing agency with 1000 employees or a community with 1000 users or simply an influencer with 12K followers. I can get paid to chose who would win the race for that day by a single vote followed by 999 more. And there is nothing wrong with it.
Hacker News is really strict about this. They don't even allow to link directly to your post. Since PH allows this, it's generally more vulnerable to any type of cheating. But it makes sense for them as each day numerous people launch and bring tons of traffic by linking to their product.
I wouldn't say its a failure honestly. If crickets chirped in the background, zero signups, zero traffic, then yes, that may be classed as a failure. But you smashed it!
I have to agree with you. The reason I said it's a failure is because I had certain expectations that we didn't manage to meet. But in general terms it was good.
Don't think it is a failure at all - you got a lot of experience and marketing knowledge. Do not put it at heart, your audience is not in PH.
Thank you, I need to find other channels now. But it'll be fine!
Thanks for sharing! It definitely will help me to prepare muy launch soon.
Im really glad it's somewhat helpful
I've never launched anything myself on Product Hunt so I can't say much about that but I can say there's a lot of value in LinkedIn connections that you can tap into from a personal level.
Start connecting with people in your area, that have similar interests, other founders, etc. You'll find most people are open to helping out as much as they can, whether it's upvoting your PH launch or writing a comment on your post to get more reach.
Thank you, I'll start exploring LinkedIn. I have an account but didn't use it much.
Great post @Krzciński_Wojtek!
Thanks! I've seen this post some time ago but I will re-read it now to search for some more inspiration. Most important thing is to keep the marketing going. And the hard part is doing it with no budget ;)
The more I read, the more I wonder about the value of Product Hunt. It seems like it is struggling with bot abuse and even those with successful launches have to work very hard to only win a few dozen users. Any thoughts about the value of pursuing PH as part of a launch strategy?
I am on my second business now (first one is an agency that does $3M/yr in revenue and the second one is recruiting product/service going on $40k ARR) and what I found and heard from others is that every startup is a flywheel that takes hundreds of events like ProductHunt launch to start spinning. Just chip away at it every day and do the right thing. No one even will most likely have a definitive impact on your business. I would bet that in 5 years your PH launch will drown in the sea of other things you would have done that will get you there. Keep at it. The product and your website look awesome
Recall is live today on PH and I just got offered a "marketing service" that will guarantee Recall in the top 5. They also just exposed their previous customers in the email. lol.
It would be quite tempting for a lot of people so makes you wonder how many people go that route.
Screengrab of their email in the tweet if you're interested.
Strange, I also had this YouTube API during my launch. And I got like 4 offers on my email about buying up votes and other not fair advantages. It feels like a big business not a community driven initiative for indie hackers. 🤷♂️
I saw this product on launch day and thought it was a great idea. Keep up the good work and don't let this launch deter you from your end goal. As somebody that has launched on Product Hunt before I can say the best takeaway is the feedback given from the Product Hunt community during your launch. Use that feedback, refine the product if needed, and push forward.
Thank you! I'm glad to hear your thought on the product.
I'd have to disagree about the feedback from PH community. I think I've never seen any valuable feedback there. It's always just "awesome product", "good luck" etc. I rarely see any feature requests or real feedback. I mean it's really nice and heartwarming to get all these kind words, but they are not something that can help you improve the product.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
You're welcome, hope it helps you in some way! :)
We are launching today and have some similar feelings :( Looks like a lot of product are buying upvotes.
Im sorry to hear that. It really sucks. Maybe as a community we should bring more attention to what's going on so PH understands that it's not ok and their reputation depends on fixing this issue.
Thanks for the aftermath Wojtek.
You should be on your way with Twitter audience. Btw let's connect.
Hopefully :) I just followed you back
You tried your 100%, mate. I don't think you failed. All the very best for Raport! :)
Thank you Atul! Hope we make it a good, sustainable startup :)
Absolutely
This is a really good article @Krzciński_Wojtek . Very well summarised. While #8 can be disheartening, it is still great to hear that you got so much traffic and signups.
While Tuesday is a more competitive day, it is still rewarding since there's higher traffic and more eyeballs on your product. So it was not a completely bad idea.
Thank you for your comment. On Friday and Saturday most people who signed up from the launch will finish their trial. This will show if anyone actually converts to paid customer.
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May be, it's the Holy Grail of launches for most Indie Hackers. But it's also the best-converting platform from what I know, so no wonder founders want to make the launch count.
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Good catch. It's just my opinion based on launching 2 SaaS products.