Launching on Product Hunt: Beat the New ChatGPT, Lost 100 Votes, Took 1st Place

Who We Are

Hello! We are the AppstoreSpy team, creating a tool for developers and marketers. AppstoreSpy is a tool that helps mobile app developers and marketers grow by spying on competitors. It collects information from various sources and uses advanced mathematics to analyze and extract key insights about app competitors.

Why We Chose to Launch on Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a platform where different startups are launched every day. Companies come and officially say that their product is ready to change the world. The number of votes plays a significant role in attracting people's attention. The more votes, the more users see the launch. We decided to launch on Product Hunt because that's where our target audience is: developers, marketers, and teams involved in creating apps.

Mistakes Made

Initially, we planned to launch on Product Hunt on September 21st. However, the preparation took longer, and we decided to postpone the date to September 28th. Unfortunately, we forgot to update the date on Product Hunt itself. As a result, our product was published earlier than planned and was not yet fully ready. We immediately contacted support with a request to remove the launch, but they did not respond for four hours. When we finally received a response, they told us that everything was fine, and the publication had been removed. Later, we found out that on the same day, three other major companies, including DALL·E 3 from Open AI, also launched. Competing with them would have been challenging.

Results

The most significant achievement was that we received feedback, approximately 100 comments about the product and its features. These comments revealed the needs and concerns of our audience, helping us adjust our roadmap and make changes to the development process.

On the same day, The NewChat GPT from Open AI was also launched alongside us, and they claimed #6 product of the day. It was satisfying to surpass them.

As a result, we secured the first place - #1 Product of the day and #8 Product of the week. This is more like a pleasant bonus and an essential point for future investors.

Our launch drew the attention of Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt, who left a comment about the product.

The mechanics we developed for issuing individual promo codes in the comments increased the overall number of comments by 85% compared to competitors.

We received 1055 votes, which is 50% more than our competitors.

After the launch, we had 1400 new visitors, and 500 new accounts were registered. The primary countries were the United States, India, Morocco, Russia, and France.

Additionally, after the launch, we received 10 suggestions for product improvement, 4 posts from influencers, and two collaboration offers.
Our expenses were only for the work of employees preparing for the launch; we did not engage in paid publications with bloggers and partners.

Life Hacks

Create an animated avatar! Several people mentioned ours and said that we stand out among competitors.

Invent your user engagement mechanics. We received many comments because we offered individual promo codes to everyone.

Engage with your community. When we talked about the launch in Telegram chats, we actively communicated with participants, shared experiences, which attracted more attention.

Involve your audience in supporting the launch. Send email newsletters, make social media posts, and publish achievements in the news feed.

Do not buy bots. Some products dishonestly inflate votes, but Product Hunt always tracks and removes them. During our launch, some of our competitors bought bots, and their launch was discredited. Bots always vote for the first place, and they also inflated our votes by about 100. Product Hunt removed them, reducing our vote count.

Actively communicate with support. Ask them any questions that may raise doubts. This is the simplest and fastest way to obtain information and launch correctly.

We are very pleased with our launch on Product Hunt: it created an information surge that attracted the attention of media and professional communities, and our product became actively discussed. We attracted a new audience and successfully engaged them in using the product.

Approved 🏄🏼‍♂️