The other side of launching on Product Hunt.
I did some research here before we launched on product hunt, and my results vary vastly from the posts I read, so I figured I would talk about it. After a bit of research and a bunch of browsing through Product Hunt I made pretty standard post. I had a bunch of pictures that we made for it, as people seem to convey most of the information through them, and I did a Maker post talking about our team and motivations. We launched at 9am and got 1 upvote very quickly, and then no more. In total we got 4 visits from Product Hunt, 2 from our team and 2 from India.
If I were to do it again I would either spend a lot more time, or I wouldn't bother at all. I don't have a following so I wasn't able to tweet it to a bunch of people, and it's an early product so we don't have a good reputation from users. I was hoping that the natural desire of Product Hunt users to test stuff would overcome that, but it didn't.
So maybe a future me will find this post, and either not bother with Product Hunt or put a lot of effort into it, see ya round!
This post is actually a lot more helpful than it sounds. Thanks for sharing mate. Also, do share the product link, I'd personally give it a go myself.
This is our project: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/buy-localized
Is it for US only? I like the "zero kilometer" idea, which is common in Italy, and prefer the things made by locals. I know, in some countries people prefer the opposite.
We want to do it worldwide, but we are starting in the US because there is the biggest selection there, and we figure a potential reason it won't work is that there just aren't enough local options.
In Europe, I think, the local products are just not presented on Amazon. And they unlikely will be. The local products (as food and cloths) had their supply chains built decades ago, and they are already optimized both for logistic (which is local, too) and price.
IMHO, Amazon has nothing to do with the "zero kilometer" idea.
Ya so even on Amazon we believe that premium brands are slowly moving off it. Amazon is making a huge push to remove the middlemen, they have training seminars in China, where they send people to factories to set them up on Amazon. If you are a premium brand then it's hard to differentiate yourself on Amazon. Pretty much every brand we've looked into was on Amazon at some point, but only 30-40% have an active store now.
We are researching like crazy and adding it to our extension, our ultimate goal is to classify a whole lot of marketplaces, and individual websites. So you would be able to browse the internet and we would give you unbiased, third party information, on where things are from to help you make decisions.
just checked it out, the idea seems good but I don't reside in the US, but more than that, how would you be monetizing it in a feasible way?
We have a very outside chance of getting affiliate revenue, anytime someone clicks on a listing in our extension and buys we would get a %, but we think it's unlikely Amazon lets us do that. More likely is we go for a subscription model, charging a few bucks a year. Monetization is a big worry for us though.
yup, it should be! I use Honey for time being, but if this one delivers more, I'd be happy to switch!
Good luck.
I could share later a ton more on PH but in my experience, it comes down to this:
• if you are launching something more general you will get more upvotes no matter what
• if you are launching something more niche, no matter how useful it is you won't do as good
i.e. A PDF can get you more upvotes & more traffic than a bootstrapped B2B product with 6,000 users. So think of it as part of a broader funnel.
I'd guess I would have the same effect if I launched there now :D Could you link the PH for learning purposes?
Interesting take. I was thinking about launching on Product Hunt. I don’t have a huge audience, but I have nice handful on YouTube and Twitter...
Would you do it again if you had a larger one? What number?
Number of followers or something? If I could go back in time then I would have built up a reasonable following before posting, and I would have reached out to followers and influential people in the space to try and get some of them to promote me. I don't have a very clear idea of the amount of followers, I think I would read other reports of successful launches and get an idea from them how much engagement from people already following them mattered.
What I wouldn't do is what I did, if I wasn't going to spend 20+ hours on the launch I wouldn't bother doing it at all, the floor of product hunt is a lot lower than I expected. I assumed that Product Hunt was a community that liked to browse New, that it was the strange corner of the internet where people browsed by r/new, but that doesn't seem to be the case. A lot of the guides on Product Hunt talk about getting early upvotes and getting out of newest and on to the front page. I've had more success doing 2 minutes responses on reddit to posts that are vaguely connected to our project than Product Hunt.
Thanks for the reply and the explanation. I was just curious if posting a project would be worth it. I am beginning to learn that building a community would be very beneficial either way. I was thinking that there would be some particular number of followers to have before launching on Product Hunt, but from what I gather from your response, it’s better to have quality followers or community members to spread the word for you. Thanks again for clarifying this for me! 👍
Yes, I've learned here on IH, that the community should be built before the product. So, I stopped with development and went to people. This have already changed alot for me.
My experience: launched https://www.producthunt.com/posts/quicknews. We did a pretty good job of mobilizing our existing user base to support us, so we got to a solid 53 upvotes.
Unfortunately we didn't get featured, a bit surprising since we had more upvotes than about a third of the eventually featured posts (I really want to figure out how the algorithm works :)). But in any case it went reasonably well, and it made us prepare materials we could then reuse (images, screenshots, user pitch). So I don't think it was wasted time.
But I'd say don't rely on launching in these places too much (PH and Hacker News being the most commonly suggested ones). My HN experiences have been even spottier. My mindset around this is: if it works, amazing; but I don't really have huge expectations and have other channels ready.
It also depends on your target users. Maybe it's just not a good audience. My $0.02.
A lot of what people are saying is true and makes sense... I think you get out of it what you put in though. Like has been said all over the place, for most people PH is not a great revenue-driving tool. I launched and made about $40 a couple years back with a product, even though I made it to the front page for the day! It also took texting everyone I knew to make a PH account if they didn't already have one and upvote the product. After we got to something like 100 upvotes, organic started to happen a lot more. Lots of free signups, but conversion was still the aforementioned $40 or so with 265 upvotes.
I did also use the experience for a follow-up blog post and Reddit post that drove a second and third wave of traffic. That was a little more conversion than PH and helped keep snowballing for a little while.
That's my 2 cents anyway! It still drove some downloads, as well as getting reposted to many worldwide tech blogs and niche Chrome extension blogs that still give me downloads from time to time. Nothing game changing though.
I think it's especially difficult in this current climate to get traction on Product Hunt unless you're launching a coronavirus or remote work related product. That seems to be what people care about nowadays.
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I agree. Product Hunt is one of many marketing "bullets". Like all the bullets you have at your disposal, you pick and choose how much effort to put into it based on the expected payoff, etc. So, you can choose to really go big on it and take all sorts of effort to maximize its benefit and that's fine. Or you can put minimal effort into it and treat it as an experiment.