Lessons from a (failed?) Product Hunt launch

tl;dr

• Kinde is a starter pack for startups; auth, feature flags & billing
• Put a lot of work into the launch just to drop down to 7th place
• Two prime features in the PH Newsletter
• New users, very happy :)

Build Up

It began with a goal: Product of the day.

Product Hunt’s most coveted badge is a true indication that the early adopter community roaming those pages believe that your product has some inherent value, or at the very least potential.

Kinde was fresh off the back of one of the biggest seed rounds in Australian history, and Product Hunt was being tossed around meetings as the next step on our journey. So, we enlisted the help of a fellow founder & hunter from across the pond, NZ based Aleks Dahlberg of Sahha.ai

Given our lacklustre experience in Product Hunt, someone like Aleks was always going to be a pivotal part of our launch, giving us the steps & insights required to take out that number 1 spot.

After numerous meetings he had drilled into me a preparedness and understanding of the platform I didn’t know was possible. We finally felt truly ready to launch.

Launch

Given Kinde is based on Australia’s East Coast, we went live at 5:01pm AEST, or 12:01am PST, on Tuesday the 16th of August.

Everything was rapidly set in motion, with each Kinde team member implored to share the launch throughout the depths of LinkedIn and Twitter, and send links to various Kinde ‘Champions’, as we like to call them.

It was a pretty incredible feeling to refresh the page at 5:02, as we raced out to a small but growing lead on our competitors. Confident that we had an enormous network and a valuable product, things were looking very good. Until we started dropping.

First we fell behind a meeting notes company, and spent hours trying everything to chase them down. And then we kept falling throughout the evening as I stayed up watching the list and replying to comments until 4am. At the end of the 24 hours we had slipped down into 7th place, with close to 500 upvotes and 130 comments.

It was an incredibly competitive day on Product Hunt. That much engagement two days prior would have left us comfortably atop the list. But still, we missed out on that coveted position, so where did things go wrong?

Here are a couple of things I learnt about Product Hunt on the 16th of August

Avoid direct links

A mistake we made lay in the way we utilised our network.

All across LinkedIn, Twitter, Slack and in private messages we plastered the link producthunt.com/posts/kinde — something I later found out to be a serious shortfall.

Product Hunt’s algorithms have grown and adapted to reduce the value of interactions from people falling directly onto the page.

Far more valuable to us would have been sending everyone to the Product Hunt homepage and allowing them to find us from there.

Space out your promotion

Obviously a significant portion of a company’s upvotes and comments come directly from their networks. Something that we struggled with was the timing of everything.

Kinde went live at 5:01pm, and by 5:10 the Kinde team had all posted across any socials or community boards they had access to.

We hit 300 upvotes in the first couple of hours, but after we exhausted our network, that growth ground to a halt.

We couldn’t maintain the interactions throughout the day, causing us to slip down quickly down the list as those with more ongoing traction climbed higher and higher.

The listing certainly benefitted from the early traction but in hindsight I do wish we had saved some of our audience for an afternoon push.

Be prepared early

Shifting across to something more positive — preparing Kinde’s Product Hunt messaging early was extremely important.

Days before the launch I had written dozens of pieces of copy for social media, partner announcements, messages to friends etc. that were all passed on to the rest of the team.

During those first couple of hours, Product Hunt is absolutely frantic, so I wouldn’t bank on having the time to create content.

Luck is a funny thing

When the launch went live, and I saw the incredible companies that we would compete with for the coming 24 hours, a sense of panic crept in. After checking PH everyday for the previous 3 weeks and seeing competitions between 2-3 standouts, suddenly we had 10 impressive launches on the same day. Canva launched a new feature that came in all the way back at 9th.

But that being said, all of these other companies were driving a huge amount of traffic to Product Hunt we may not have had access to otherwise. So it is difficult to say whether it would’ve been better to come in at number one on a slower day, or stuck to our guns.

All is well that ends well

Although the position was disappointing, it is a bit of a vanity metric after all. The team counts the launch overall a success. Not only did we pull in thousands of website visitors and hundreds of new users, we also had two features in the Product Hunt newsletter.

One of them was a dedicated email on Kinde: ‘A starter pack for startups’ - hard to be disappointed with that :)