How we finished Top 5 on Product Hunt last December
This post originally appeared on the Growing gSweets newsletter
Overview
- Starting users: 135
- Ending users: 515
This update is all about our Product Hunt launch that happened on Dec 21. Let’s discuss:
- The planning
- The day-of
- The results
Planning our launch
Much of the planning was actually hustling my network for early installs weeks before launch day. This introduced gSweets to hundreds of people so it was less foreign to them on launch day.
I made a short list of to-do’s in Notion to prepare for the launch.
Preparing the launch materials and getting them right took about 4 hours. I used PreviewHunt to create a live mockup of our Product Hunt page a week before launch day. This helped me get specific feedback from other makers on images and copy that helped polish our messaging.
As a team, we really wanted to launch in 2020 to start getting initial feedback. To us, that meant launching before everyone signed off for Christmas vacation. We also wanted to launch with features that wow’d, beyond just native Google Docs formatting. That meant we were racing to build our Emoji and GIPHY integrations 2 weeks before launch day.
Fortunately, we had just brought on a great second developer to help us and he was able to help ship these features in time. Once the features we’re ready I was able to put together a new preview video that highlighted our Emoji & GIPHY features.
Launch day
Launch day was almost exclusively spent messaging people who I’d previously spoken to about gSweets, and responding to comments on Product Hunt. Sadly, if you only rely on the PH audience, it’s unlikely you’ll finish top 5 on a competitive day. That meant asking tons of people to do me the favour of taking a moment to upvote or comment on our posting.
- Twitter DMing: 65 people
- LinkedIn DMing: 168 people
- Emailing blast to beta users: 88 people
In addition to the DMs, I posted updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, 6 Slack groups and Facebook groups. I also reached out to the team at Unsplash to let them know about our launch, and their social team was kind enough to spread the love on Twitter.
The results
The numbers
- We received the #5 Product of the Day badge, despite it showing us 3rd from the top (this meant we’d be featured in next day’s newsletter.)
- We’d gotten somewhere around 600-650 upvotes
- We received about ~370 installs from the Product Hunt launch over the next 3 days, taking us past 500 total installs.
The feedback
Better than the quantitative impact of the launch was some of the qualitative feedback we received across channels.
- We received 3 feature requests (deeper formatting, bitmoji, Google slides)
- We received a request for Terms of Use, MSA docs from a big company with typical IT department red-tape.
- We saw tons of folks on twitter commenting & sharing our enthusiasm for what we’ve built.
Best of all, none of this was coming from folks we’d never met 😃
This was a great ending to 2020, but we’re just getting started. In 2021 we’re doubling down on our features, continuing to experiment with Chrome Webstore optimization, and sharing more of our journey along the way.
Happy new year,
Jer (& Christoph)
