Abyssale

Our product is a social & advertising banner generation platform. Last week we've launched on ProductHunt and since then we've seen a crazy amount of traffic on Abyssale.com!

Today we've just hit over 40,000 generated banners on the platform! And this number is growing as I'm writing this milestone 😎

Launching on PH is a great way to boost your website traffic and create some hype around your product/solution. The trick here is to retain some kind of traffic stability because most of the time you will see a massive drop in traffic the days following your launch...

So far the most interesting point is that PH is no longer our primary source of traffic and we still have a big and steady influx of visitors every single day!

Product Hunt is one of the most peculiar places in the web product and marketing landscape, we launched our alpha last week on PH and were pretty surprised with the results we got so far.

In one month we grew from 500 to 1700+ users on our alpha! Obviously PH had a huge role in this outcome, even after our launch last week users keep coming and subscribing on our landing page and we still have a quite nice daily traffic on our LP (around 300/day).

Obviously finishing 2nd of the day has probably a big impact on those metrics, but for the long trend finishing in the top 10 of the week is also an objective worth taking into consideration!

Getting this much traffic and subscriptions on this short period of time had a very beneficial impact:

• We discovered that our current AWS setup its handling pretty quite well this kind of volume
• More than 160 users sent us feedback (We’re glad we moved our survey on our platform)
• We have a clear view of the back and front errors that need to be fixed
• Since we don’t charge money for our solution during this alpha, we can’t say we found market fit but we clearly have some market interest and this gave us a great confidence/morale boost.

Key takeaway: Having a lot of followers on social networks does not equate to having an interested and committed audience that would jump through hoops if you say so. The three of us has less than 300+ follower combined on Twitter still we got more upvotes (and quality ones) than other products launched by « bigger » players.

Hello everyone!

Today, We are very very excited because we are launching Abyssale alpha on Product Hunt 🚀🚀

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/abyssale-alpha

Beginning of this year, we wondered about generating procedurally design assets. After many discussions, customer discoveries & surveys, we found out that marketing a product often requires the creation of visual content which at first sight seems simple but in fact, is a tough task because it usually involves design skills & knowledge that only a designer has.

Everyday banner ads and other types of marketing assets are published online, this is why we were convinced that something was currently lacking in the marketing automation landscape.

Hence we decided to build Abyssale, a platform that enables you to generate marketing banners for your business with minimal inputs from your end (text, logo, picture(s) & additional styling options).

More than a half year later, here we are, launching and hoping for our product (Abyssale alpha) to shine ⭐

If you are interested in our project and journey you could help us and show some support on our PH post.

To better understand the current challenges our prospect userbase is currently facing, we initiated one month ago a round of discussions with CMO's, acquisition experts & founder's from a wide range of company sizes.

How:
Reach our network (Mostly Linkedin & Friends) to set-up 30min Google Hangout call with ideal customers.

Difficulty:

• Easy to Medium
• Mostly time-consuming
• Doing this during summer is a challenge by itself (a lot of people are OOF especially in Europe)
• Defining ahead the topics needed to be covered during these interviews is also a great exercise > this will put you in the shoes of your prospects.

Objective:

• Validate our current alpha build
• Prioritize our roadmap for the Beta release
• Discover new pain-points and challenges we did not think of
• Get insights on possible pricing models

Results:
Talking with a wider range of company sizes gave us a better understanding of marketing pain-points companies are facing at each step of their growths.

Having real discussions with people greatly helped to shape our sales pitch and how to shift-it for different types of prospects.

There are some specificities between B2C and B2B types of companies, mostly around the acquisition channels they are targeting and how they address their userbase.

Our product vision did not pivot but the timing for each feature releases has been ordered differently to enhance our go-to-market strategy.

Next-step:

• Add 20 more interviews to our backlog
• Get more B2B type of businesses

Tips:
These types of interviews should not be about your product, but about their current working process & pain-points = LISTEN

Keep in mind the topics you wish to cover (print your topics on a sheet of paper) and jump between topics while keeping the discussion as fluid as possible = This is a discussion, not an interrogatory.

The first interviews will seem a bit weird, but as you practice your discussion flow will improve greatly (you won't need that sheet of paper anymore)

Keep track of every discussion by taking notes and store them/rank them/... = We use Airtable to arrange and track everything.

Use Calendly to ease-up the meeting scheduling (Doing everything by hand is very ineffective and results in many email back-and-forths)

With little to no marketing effort, our alpha subscriber list grew to more than 500 users!

We got a great uptick of users when we got showcased on Betalist (end of May) this got us roughly 100 emails in 1 day.

Our acquisition rate spiked up to 13% at some point, this toned down to a steady 6-7% for the past 2months now. Surprisingly we are getting some organic traffic (and signups from it) with a single landing page, though launching our blog mid-June quite helped a lot (great to steadily grow your Domain Authority).

There are definitively some improvements that could be made on the current landing page… Also, spending more time on marketing our product could most probably increase our current numbers.

Our goal was to ship a product with as little features as possible in order to gather feedback asking for specific missing features (we were aware of what was missing) but "artificially" shipping a product lacking in features helped us greatly to shape our product and tech roadmap for the upcoming Beta.

Advice: Ship less is better than too much