How we got 150 Signups on our Web App and our First $100+ of revenue

TLDR: We launched our video creation tool “Vidds” on Product Hunt after a lot of preparation and became #4 product of day which led to 150 signups over the following week and 2 subscription purchases totalling $127.80. Find out everything we did below.

Remember, it’s important to set realistic expectations, for this launch we set ourselves the achievable goal of 100 upvotes with a “handful” of signups and we said that a paying user would be a huge bonus.

Anyway, here’s what we did…

Pre-Launch:

Research
We read other articles and blog posts about successful launches which helped guide our strategy and prioritise our launch tasks, credit to Type Studio for their great article, read it here. We also looked deeply at previous successful launches on Product Hunt and analysed what made them great and why they stood out to us.
It was clear to us that other small teams that did well made their launches more personal. This meant we planned our video to be a “talking to camera” piece followed by a product walkthrough, and our texts would need to include our story.
What day and time should you launch? It turns out there are more and less “competitive” days. Tues, Wed, Thurs being the competitive ones and Mon, Fri and weekends being less so. Oh, and launch at 00.01 San Francisco time so you maximise the time your product will be live for.
We chose to launch on Tuesday which was pegged as the most competitive day but also the day when there is most activity on the Product Hunt platform. If you wanna be the best, you’ve gotta launch against the best. Plus, more activity = more upvotes right?

Create Assets
Asset design and creation was guided by our research, we saw that popular launches most often had nicely designed mockups. So, we opted for mockups of our product, showcasing key screens of the app with a headline text to emphasis the benefit of the feature being shown. We made 5 images that were accompanied by our main Video. The video was filmed on an iPhone and using a simple screen recording using Quicktime and simply edited together in Vidds with subtitles. Then uploaded to YouTube. The idea was to keep it simple, none of this fancy editing with bells and whistles - we wanted to show that we are a team of two with limited budget and keep it super personal.

Update Landing Pages with up-to-date Content
We realised that our product had been through a few iterations before our Product Hunt launch and a lot of screenshots/screen-recordings on the landing page were outdated. We wanted to make sure that the page was up-to-date and would match a new user's experience within the app.

Create Tutorials
To try and maximise product usage and minimise user drop-off we created a tutorial video that we embedded in the dashboard of the app. We recorded this on the run-up to launch day to make sure it contained the current version of the app.

Create email drip
An email drip campaign is a great way to onboard and activate users once they’ve signed up. We used Mailchimp to design and build an automated email drip campaign in an attempt to do exactly this.

Connect signup form to email drip
With a new drip campaign designed and ready to go, we needed to make sure that the first email in the sequence fired as soon as a new user confirmed their account. This would help reduce bounce rates and improve open rates.

Write all launch texts - product descriptions, first comment, etc.
A big part of a product hunt launch is getting the texts to sing your product’s praises. If you’ve got a great landing page, chances are you already have some great texts that you can repurpose. But I’d recommend giving them a re-write to help them speak directly to the Product Hunt audience and make them unique - chances are that they’ll be looking at your landing page directly after reading your launch post. We pre-wrote our texts including the “first comment” which is posted as part of the launch.

Create launch day promo posts - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Insta etc
If you create your launch day promo posts and tweets ahead of time then you won’t have to scramble to throw something together whilst trying to keep one-eye on the launch day comments. Copy, paste, post, done!

Create coupon code for Product Hunt signups
We made a 50% off code for all Product Hunt signups. Depending on your product offering this could be a good way to entice users to signup and pay - plus Product Hunt has a coupon code promo section that you can fill out when you launch

Email current users/supporters about up-coming Product Hunt launch and ask for launch day support
Who better to support your launch than your current users and fans? We sent an email a few days before explaining what a Product Hunt launch is and why it’s important to us. We informed them of the day we'd be launching and asked for their support - we even prompted them to signup for a Product Hunt account ahead of time. I’ve heard that upvotes from accounts that signed up on the day have less weight than those that signed up earlier.

Reach out to close friends and your network for launch day support
The days leading up to launch day were spent messaging all the people I knew I could rely on for an early upvote and comment. So call in those favours from your mates, colleagues or anyone else that you think likes you enough to help out. Our list was about 30 people long, and 25 confirmed they'd give an early upvote - we directly asked for early support to help us with visibility.

Schedule launch
In Product Hunt you have the option to schedule your launch post up to a week in advance. I was scrambling around 40 minutes before to schedule the post. Very stressful and not recommended, but definitely better than posting live at launch time. Definitely schedule early, as it removes any last minute stress and lets you make sure that everything is completed and you’re happy with how it looks.

Launch day

Follow up with list of “early supporters” to ensure their support
5 minutes before launch I sent out a WhatsApp/linkedin messaged to give a gentle nudge to all the people who had agreed to support us. The earlier you get some upvotes and comments the better momentum you’ll have through the day. The goal is to stay high enough up the homepage that you’re visible all day. The Products on the first page naturally get more upvotes based on their position and number of time they're seen.

Send out a “we launched” email to your mailing lists
We sent an email to our mailing list at the time of launch, asking for support and we included a direct link to our launch post. If your smart you might create this before and just add in the correct link when you send.

Respond to all comments on Product Hunt with a personal and unique reply
Try to respond to comments as they come in in-real-time, the mysteries of the Product Hunt algorithm remain a mystery, but it does seem like the more comments will give more momentum and your replies seem to count as comments too. My co-founder and I were in slack organising who would reply to which comments for the first hour or so, then we took shifts through the rest of the day.

Post your launch posts on Twitter, LinkedIn etc
We posted from personal and product accounts on LinkedIn and Twitter to share out launch and ask for support. Let your community/network know you’ve launched. Post on your social media accounts and ask for support.

Engage with your Product Hunt competitors
We found the social accounts of the other products that launched on the same day and tweeted at them starting a public competition. This got us retweets/comments, increased the reach of our launch and was a fun way to engage with the other teams that were launching.

Post on Indie Hackers after a couple of hours with your current results
At this point we had been #1 product of the day for 20 minutes before slipping into #3 position so we used the title “Launched on Product Hunt - held #1 spot for 20 minutes + 14 Signups” this got 7 votes, 3 comments & 238 views. Not groundbreaking but definitely brought so attention and support to the launch.

Man your chat widget and contact form to reply to any support/feedback tickets
We stayed by our laptops to answer any chat requests, most were people trying to sell us their services but occasionally a real person came through and we made sure their first impression of our support was good. We also had a few reach us via our contact form asking general questions so we answered these too. A few people definitely signed up as a result.

Thank your list of early supporters and ask them to share it further with anyone else they think is relevant
By lunchtime, we sent messages to our early supporters thanking them for upvoting and commenting, gave them an update on how it was going and then asked for them to share our launch with others they thought might help out.

Tweet at relevant people and reply/re-tweet to any live Product Hunt launch related tweets about you
Vidds was tweeted by Product Hunt, so we naturally retweeted this and engaged with those that commented on their tweet. There’s a chance that Product Hunt might tweet about your launch too, so keep an eye out for this so you can retweet and engage with any commenters

Keep refreshing your launch-day dashboard ;)

To summarise, I think the key to our success was ensuring a bunch of early support for our launch. But the well designed assets and texts helped us carry that momentum throughout the day as more people organically checked us out. The work we put into our landing page and email drip for sure helped with converting the paying users, but it's hard to track directly.

See our launch post and all the assets we created