The result of my 6-month paid Product Hunt campaign
In early 2019, I signed up for a six-month “promoted product post” campaign with Product Hunt. GMass has been featured on the site organically several times in the past, and the Product Hunt community has always liked GMass, so I thought a paid promoted campaign could boost our user base and increase awareness.
The deal was this: a six-month-long promotion, where GMass would be featured as the promoted product of the day once a week, every week, for those six months, totaling 24 total days of promotion.
The cost per promoted post was $2,800. So the total cost over six months was $67,200.
I examined the data in Google Analytics and here were the key takeaways:
- The promotion generated a total of about 18,800 unique pageviews over the six months. Each day resulted in anywhere from 600 to 1,200 unique pageviews.
- The highest numbers of unique pageviews per day came earlier in the six months, and the lowest numbers of unique pageviews came later.
- The average time spent on our homepage, as a result of clicking the PH promotion, was 8.5 minutes, which is pretty good. Either that speaks to how engaging our homepage is, or how relevant the PH user base was to GMass, or perhaps both.
Now, you're probably thinking, that's interesting, Ajay, but how many new users signed up as a result of the promotion?
Throughout the six months, a total of 498 user accounts were created by clicking through the promoted post link.
Of these 498 user accounts, 41 upgraded to a paid subscription. The average subscription price of a GMass account is $16/month, so doing 41 x $16/month yields $656/month recurring revenue gain from this promotion. Another way to look at it is we spent about $1,500 per new paid subscriber.
So was it worth it financially in terms of customer acquisition cost (CAC)? Probably not. Would I do another paid campaign? Perhaps.
I provide more data and analysis, as well as explain why I might consider doing another campaign in the full post. But I wanted to post the key findings here for interest and discussion.
If you want to read the full thing, check it out here: https://www.gmass.co/blog/product-hunt-promoted-posts/
That sounds like an insanely high acquisition cost for a $16 product
Thank you, you just helped me with the decision. I had been considering their paid post for quite some time now, but not anymore. I can easily acquire paid customers for $30-50 using Facebook ads which is what I am doing right now.
Udit the facebook masta has spoken!
Lol. That's flattering ☺️
This is very interesting Ajay, thanks for sharing. I've been considering running a campaign with them and need to make sure we don't blow our budget.
Great article @RealAjayGoel. I learned a lot reading the full post.
Thank you @RealAjayGoel for being so transparent.
8.5 mn average session time is incredibly high. The PH audience was definitely a great fit for your product.
But $1500 CAC for a $16MRR is also insanely high. Assuming 0% churn and no inflation, it will take you 8 years to get your money back.
Why did you run a 6 months promotion? You could have stopped after 1 or 2 months, especially given that you observed diminishing returns.
Thanks for sharing the actual data.
Thanks for the great insights. In your next post, please continue to follow-up and let us know how many of these users churn. Would be keen to know more.
I heard that GMass started as a hobby project, implemented solely by the founder. How big is the company at the moment?
Thanks for sharing.
Why did you agree to a 6 month promotion? Were you not able to cancel after the first couple of posts?
What page were you sending users to from product hunt?
What other paid channels have you tried? What will you try next?
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I think you could improve your landing page significantly by focusing on benefits rather than listing features.
Your header bar takes the focus away from the main thing, buying the app.
Get rid of the "products" tab.
Change "features" to "benefits".
Remove "blog".
I would also consider adding a margin to both the logo and the nav-bar to bring them closer to the center.
This is too narrow. I don't know what that means for me. I would try changing this.
"Supercharge your Gmail" or "Make your Gmail an unfair advantage"
example: https://imgur.com/a/TFxwgNU
Get rid of anything that's superfluous. Focus on benefits. Don't make lists longer than 3-5 items, otherwise users will just scan over them.
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Have you tried referral marketing? What about influencer marketing?
Thank you for sharing
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I agree 100%.
To be fair, we should also consider network effects or referrals (if they're part of the marketing stream), and also retargeting of those initial 498 signups and 18,000 link clicks (those leads have some non-zero value).
And with a decent/good conversion rate on those 18,000 clicks it would be looking a lot better.
Still, pretty far from the type of value you should be looking for.
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