How my product was on Product Hunt *twice* 🤩 in 5 days, then became #3 product of the day.
My PH launch was never supposed to be a big bang. I don't know the platform well enough and I don't have the right network yet to make a launch instantly successful. I also want to play the long term game and don't bet too much, both in time but also mentally, on one big launch.
But then my PH launch became quite successful completely unexpected. Here's what happened to the Freddy Feedback PH launch:
Tuesday, July 21st:
I posted Freddy without much thought, and did this around 15:00 CET, that's 6am PST when PHs cycle is already on for 6 hours. I did however make sure that the post itself: visuals, first comment, descriptions etc looked good.
At the end of the day I had about 30 upvotes.
Saturday, July 25th:
I don't fully remember why I checked my PH profile, but I think it was a standard summary email from PH. Curious to see what was happening I went to my product page. There it was indicated that it was launch day. WHAT!? IT'S LAUNCH DAY.... AGAIN?
Then I did what any sane Indie Hacker would do (in this order): panic, stop panicking, open my laptop and go into launch day mode.
Freddy was #2 for most of the day. Then I needed to go to bed (CET) and when I woke up it ended up being #3 product of the day!
To figure out what was happening I sent an email to the PH team asking them how on earth it was possible that I was on there twice in one week. Here's their reply:
"When you launched Freddy Feedback, your post wasn’t featured on the day it was hunted, but did appear on the newest page.
Occasionally, If your post wasn’t featured, but has received interest from the community and meets our guidelines, it may be featured for the following day so that it has a full 24 hours on the homepage.
This is what happened with Freddy Feedback, after it was launched, it did receive significant community interest and met our guidelines. It was then re-scheduled for Saturday, managed to make it to the homepage and ended the day as the #3 product of the day!"
As a bonus, I was in the PH newsletter 2 days later 🚀
I guess that "interest from the community" and "meets our guidelines" are still the secret PH sauce, so my conclusion is that I got lucky.
The one thing that I will say, and hopefully you can see that from my website, is that I put a lot of effort in the design and UX.
I truly believe that if you make something look and feel good you will be taken more seriously, get more interest and more customers.
Here are some interesting things that happened since that Saturday:
📈 Uptick in traffic
🚫 Higher number of spam accounts creation (implemented a fix for this)
🐦 A handful of Twitter followers (including the CEO of a big competitor 😄)
💰 A handful of new customers
🤝 A few partnership proposals
👩🎓 A few students asking to use Freddy for free
🐦 The Freddy Feedback Twitter handle being mentioned and shared on Twitter by some questionable accounts
To answer the million dollar question: this was definitely not a 'I went from 0 to 1k MRR in just a few days', but I can clearly see the long term value of this and it's a nice motivation booster as well. I'm really grateful to PH for featuring Freddy again!
There are lots of topics that I'll try to cover later:
- How to dodge spam account creation
- Why I don't have a free tier
- How I could've prepared better for this launch
The PH post:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/freddy-feedback
My product:
https://freddyfeedback.com
Make sure to follow our journey on Twitter!
https://twitter.com/joost_van_hoof
https://twitter.com/FreddyFeedback
Any questions let me know!
@eskimo Thanks for sharing that with us! I'm on the verge to showcase my product there as well, somewhere in the very near future, so I really appreciate the insight.
I also feel some relief, that not everyone who makes it to the top 3 or 5 products of the day, needs to skyrocket his MRR. Thanks again for the insight, and all the best for your Freddy Feedback journey!
I think I could've easily got anywhere between 20 and maybe even 100 signups if I had a free plan. But I also think that of those almost none would've converted, and the ones that would've converted did sign up directly. It's just because of the nature of the product and some technicalities behind it that I don't think it will work, but I might change my mind in a couple of weeks...
Make sure you let us know when you launch so we can help you get to that featured section :-).
I will do, thanks!
I guess it's a major question for most SaaS if they should offer a free plan or not. And I'm not sure on how I would decide in some cases, because for me it's hard to judge on that. Both ways have pro's and con's (like almost everything in life). But I believe you made the right decision, and if not, you will be able to pivot.