Our First Time on Product Hunt
Back in the beginning days of 2014 Ryan Hoover shot me an email asking me to do an AMA on ProductHunt –at the time I still think it was a side project. (I’m user 1,077 #humblebrag)
I’m a sucker for product and community so was happy to help out. Also file Ryan’s email under things that don’t scale and how to build a community.
We launched Visible 1.0 on Product Hunt January 3, 2014, you can see the post and AMA here. The post got 93 upvotes I think we were near the top but honestly can’t recall.
We got some nice inbound from the post, definitely our largest day of traffic for Visible to that point. I don’t have any hard data on signups but do have the old app and marketing site Google Analytics profile.
Fast forward 593 Days.
Our Visible 2.0 release was featured on Product Hunt (find it here). We got 290 upvotes, finished 10th overall (the top hunt had 963 votes for reference) and we got 67 companies to sign up and become active on Visible. That number is impressive because we have a high barrier for a company to become active on Visible.
The day we were featured also ended up being our highest trafficked day in our marketing site’s history. Product Hunt referrals ended up over 235% from the first feature 593 days ago.
Other Notes:
While I’m incredibly impressed by the traffic and growth Product Hunt sent and the growth of the community, I thought the number was a little low. There are some factors like us not being in the Top 3, we didn’t heavily market it, etc.
However, after some quick digging I remembered that Product Hunt used to directly send you to a Hunt URL. This is represented as a “/” in the Referral Path in GA.
Today it takes an additional click on the “Get it” to get to a hunt. This totally makes as they want you to stay in the PH community, engage, etc. I’d be curious what would happen if they still directly sent you to the site!
Feel free to email me any questions about launching on Product Hunt.
Up & To the Right!
Mike