Anyone used Product Hunt's Ship recently? What are your thoughts?
It's had mixed reviews here on the past but couldn't find much recent discussion of it since they launched 2.0. I wasn't too impressed by the free version but it's understandably limited. Has anyone here had much success with the pro plans? Was it a good way of talking to and acquiring early users?
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It's all about your needs. If you need to be up and running fast to focus on building customers then it's a sure bet. Again, don't expect that a PH ship page will "give" you users, simply expect that within minutes you can be live to start focusing on new customer growth/sales.
My original list grew to 440 people after a few weeks.
I seen a 46% open rate and 12% click rate when I used ship to re-engage that audience
https://cl.ly/c10d83bb70db
A few weeks later I messaged again to 560 people
42% open and 9% click
https://cl.ly/ba00b01fc160
So the tools do function properly.
In short go live fast as possible. Communicate to your list with meaningful updates. Ship. Ship again and continue to iterate on feedback and ship!
Thanks for your review. Those sound like pretty good stats, I think it's probably worth trying for my product.
I did launch on PH, and got some users but the PH community people are mostly tech geek or need a tool and our product was mental well-being, so it was not good, not bad.
I don't recommend it. I've used their Pro plan to build beta user lists for a couple of projects. Their built-in email sending system didn't work, and their support never fixed it, even after me asking multiple times. So I ended up using Mailchimp for that.
On the positive side, I was able to collect interest, and got subscribers once I promoted via the Pro plan. On the other hand when I reached out to those folks via email, I got abysmal open/response rates.
In other words: poor support and low quality leads. Definitely not worth the cost for a Pro plan, and I probably wouldn't even bother with the free version.
What was your product if you don't mind me asking? Was it a good fit for the general PH audience?
I listed a few products -- a personal productivity app (assistant to help you remember to do things), a dev productivity service, and a meditation app.
The personal productivity app got the most subscribers (200+) -- but even with that level of interest, I got very little engagement from that set of users.
I'm fairly turned off by their chatbot-like landing pages—obviously a product that was designed during peak chatbot hype. So nah, based on that impression, can't really recommend.
I do find those chatbot landing pages pretty annoying too, although I think they have more templates now.