Day after my first launch on PH (numbers)

This was my first launch on Product Hunt. On November 17th, I released my Hands Illustrations and hoped only for 50 upvotes. This is not a cheap illustrations pack ($48), so I didn’t think it would get much attention; free illustrations are always more successful on PH. So I thought to myself that 50 upvotes would satisfy me. I’ve seen the first releases of some successful startups, and they only have ~10 upvotes on some products. This was my main fear.

But you might be asking, why then did you make your first release this expensive illustrations pack? Well, currently I only have 6 illustration packs available, and my strategy is to show potential customers what’s on kapustin.co, where you can find high quality paid illustrations. Once I have about 10–12 paid packs, I’ll create a totally free big set especially for Product Hunt launch, to draw maximum attention to all 10–12 packs.

On November 18th, my illustrations pack received ~200 upvotes and was in 17th place overall. That was 100% a success for me, as it was 4 times more than what I was hoping for!

Screenshot from November 26

Now, more details on the numbers!

I don’t do any ads for the website, so before releasing the pack I had ~67 visitors over the last 7 days (from my social media). This helped me to figure out the exact effect after launch. On the next day, Google Analytics showed me 502 visitors. This means that after ending up in 17th place on PH, I got ~454 new visitors.

Before / after statistic

But it did not give me sales. For each pack, I have a free demo version with one illustration in all formats, so that the consumer can try the quality of the product before buying. For the PH launch, I created a special free demo of 10 raster illustrations (PNG).

Demo Hands Illustrations

32 customers downloaded the demo illustrations. Of those 32 customers, one downloaded the demo and donated $3, another one donated $1, two gave me a 5-star rating on Gumroad, and six subscribed to updates via my form.

But that wasn’t the end of the growth in traffic. After launching, my visitors didn’t get down to 0. Some design blogs wrote a couple posts about the Hands Illustrations and on November 24rd, I reached ~1000 visitors over the last 7 days (+546 after finishing PH day).

Statistic from November 24

To summarize the above, after I launched my Hands Illustrations on PH, I got:

• Sales: $0
• Donates for Demo: $4
• Emails: 38
• Dubious partnership offers: 3
• Interesting partnership proposal: 1
• Visitors: ~1000