🚀 PH's #5 Product of the Day — Lessons learned from a small victory!
🚀 As some of you may know, Outdone — the Ai-powered gift recommender (https://www.outdone.io) — officially launched on Product Hunt this past Friday.
(https://www.producthunt.com/posts/outdone)
Without much of an audience to lean on, we went into launch day with high hopes and low expectations. Really, we would have been happy with a couple dozen upvotes and a few pieces of thoughtful user feedback.
Well, when all the dust settled, Outdone's launch far exceed our expectations. We received over 300 upvotes, secured the 5th place on the day, and (most shockingly) Outdone was featured as the headline topic in Friday's newsletter — the same day our post went live! (https://www.producthunt.com/newsletter/9541-gift-smarter)
So suffice to say, we are ecstatic. But, and this is a big "but", we should have been more strategic with our objective setting...
Sure we got more site traffic in those few days than we had seen since going live, but a one-time influx of users isn't the end all be all. What we failed to do is set a true goal for our launch — one that would help turn this traffic bump into long-term audience building.
If you're gearing up for a PH launch, I cannot stress enough how much effort you should put into using this extra visibility to build your email list. For a growing company a strong email list is worth its weight in gold. So if (like Outdone) your email capture CTA isn't a highlight of your site, make it one — or at least build a PH-specific landing page that emphasizes this.
This added work, if you're as lucky as we were to have thousands of users visit your site, will help you build a reliable way to keep folks coming back to your product for months to come.
Other than that, I'd say have no shame in sharing your launch link with as many folks in the indie hacking space as you know (without spamming, of course). For the most part, everyone is eager to help because they have either been in your shoes before or are planning to be in the near future.
Happy to answer any questions about our Product Hunt experience in the comments below. And if you're launching in the coming days, don't hesitate to drop a link — always willing to upvote something cool!
That meme is amazing hahaha! Congrats on the launch. Did you do a Ship page? How/where did you promote it, which were the best channels? Thank you.
Thanks again @jeffsvic!
We're actually gearing up to launch a new version of Outdone later this summer! If you'd like to stay in the know and do us a huge favor, feel free to follow us on Product Hunt! https://www.producthunt.com/products/outdone
Haha, glad you liked it!
Yes, we used a Ship page. They offer a 7 day free trial, so we set one up 6 days prior to launching. We were only able to get a couple dozen folks to sign up for this, though.
Our primary engagement driver was Slack. We're in a handful of Indie Hacker-esque Slack workspaces like Indie Worldwide and Pigeon Hack. Basically, a few days ahead of time we started posting to drive up hype. Then, we sent launch messages to anyone who had previously reacted positively or left a comment. Scheduling these messages ahead of time saved a bunch of headaches come launch day.
We posted a bit on Reddit as well, but didn't get great engagement there.
One thing that totally slipped my mind while writing this was the importance of a top Hunter! We used Upvote Bell (https://upvote-bell.com/leaderboard?ref=producthunt) to find a handful of top Hunters who had previously hunted similar products to ours. We dm'd a few of them on Twitter and luckily one, who happened to be one of the top 20 Hunters of all time, responded and agreed to help us out. No doubt this helped us tremendously.
Are you planning to launch something soon?