How I got 500 new users from a "failed" ProductHunt launch by having a 52% conversion rate on the landing page

Hey folks,

A few weeks ago I launched fama.so on ProductHunt (PH). I ended the day in 11th place. This would be considered a failure by many but I still managed to rake in 511 new signups on 964 page visits. The conversion rate of my landing page has leveled off since then and sits at ~52%, which is still terrific.

In this rant, I'll share learnings on what I found important when launching on ProductHunt and creating a highly converting landing page.

I'm a beginner when it comes to marketing and design so my advice may be more useful to another beginner like me. If you're an experienced marketer or a designer I'd appreciate it if you'd leave a comment expanding on my post or sharing feedback.

General advice

1. Let someone proofread your copy

This goes for your ProductHunt launch and the landing page.

In your head, everything you wrote makes sense because any gaps and inconsistencies will automatically be filled in by your brain. After all, you know what you're writing about. Hopefully.

Let someone else read that description you wrote. Preferably it would be a native English speaker but anyone will do.

I shared my copy with a few friends and the issues they found were hilarious. For example, my copy focused hard on what fama.so does but I never bothered to explain why would anyone want to use it and what problem it solves. Once people pointed that out to me I changed my first sentence from explaining how I use cool text-to-speech tech based on neural networks to this:

Fama lets you listen to email newsletters while you're commuting, working out, or doing anything, really. Just like audiobooks!

Now in the first 3 seconds you know what problem this product solves.

If you don't have anyone to proofread it for you, at least use Grammarly or a similar tool to fix any typos and grammatical errors.

Or send it over to me, my Twitter DMs are open.

ProductHunt

Make sure to schedule your ProductHunt launch at the right time

My only regret is launching 1-2 hours into the new day when there were already products with 50-100 upvotes so my product was always around ~10th place. This reduced fama's discoverability because it was effectively pushed below the infamous fold.

Schedule your launch and launch it on the first minute of the new day (00:01 of Pacific time is a new day for PH). Then, make sure to get as many upvotes in the first hour so your product is one of the first people will see when they visit PH. Share a direct link to your product with family, friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, Twitter etc.

People say that linking directly to your product on PH is bad because the algorithm will rank you lower but that doesn't seem to be true. Read about it in this blog post by ProductHunt.

Don't ask for upvotes directly and don't spam people, it's not a good look and it's against PH code-of-conduct. To be honest, this is more of a "do what I say, not what I do" type of advice. Hope you forgive me.

Use a gif for your PH thumbnail

There are a lot of products on PH and you're fighting all of them for visitor's attention. Create a thumbnail that stands out, preferably a gif.

It doesn't have to be an amazing gif like what Intercom uses for their launches. I created mine by taking screenshots of 2 emojis and using ezgif online to generate a gif.

Is it the best-looking thumbnail? No.

Does it stand out in a sea of static PH thumbnails? Yes.

Will it make people more likely to check out my product? Probably.

Landing page

It doesn't have to be beautiful but it can't be ugly

I am no designer but there are no excuses for designing a complete crap of a website anymore. Use a service like carrd.com to build your website. Get inspired by landing pages of the products you personally use. Yes, what I mean here is rip them off.

Then, use coolors.co to choose a color palette you like. The colors in these palettes look good together and it will make your job way easier.

I selected a vibrant and vivid palette that won't give off a too serious feel for my product. It's a side-project after all intended to be used mostly by tech-savvy professionals.

Have a big juicy CTA and clear value proposition

Be as concise as possible. There's nothing worse than having to scroll through a page for a minute before figuring out what the product does. This ties into the copy advice above. Have a few friends check out your landing page. Ask them to be brutally honest.

When it comes to CTA, I'd argue that having a comically big CTA is better than having a small CTA. So go wild! Ok, don't go completely wild but don't be afraid to make it pop either!

This is what I came up with:

Let visitors try using the product right there on the landing page

Or at least come as close as possible to letting them use it. For fama this meant allowing visitors to listen to an example episode of narrated Morning Brew on the landing page:

Additionally, I put a 40-second loom that shows visitors how it looks like when they are using fama for real with their favourite podcasting app.

Gather analytics immediately

Without analytics you're running blind. Seriously, you need to at least see how many people visited your landing page to calculate the conversion rate. If you have a low conversion rate it means you have to change something. Maybe you don't know what right off the bat but at least you can start experimenting until you find what works.

I use Google Analytics for this but I hear good things about plausible.io

That's it! Hope it helps someone :)