A successful Product Hunt launch: The Numbers

How did finishing as a "Product of the Day" affect The Hack Stack's numbers?

Sep 19, 2020

The Hack Stack was the 15th of my own products that I’ve listed on Product Hunt and the first one that didn’t finish beneath the “load more” link.

283 upvotes
43 comments
#4 Product of the Day

Let’s get a few things out of the way first. I visit Product Hunt every day multiple times and have done so easily for 6 or 7 years. That being said, I’m pretty critical of the site in terms of its UX and its practices. Also, I’m very wary of the way many people treat it as almost a “make or break” moment in their product lifecycle. It’s not.

Now, those opinions were formed by someone who had never tasted Product Hunt success. Have my opinions changed? Well let’s get into the numbers first and then I’ll talk about that.

The 5 days before Product Hunt day

Surprisingly, The Hack Stack had been getting some (relatively) impressive traffic since I first made it public. This is largely due to the great crowd over at Indie Hackers. A few days after that I put it on Hacker News and Reddit where it also gained a good bit (relatively speaking) of traction.

So, for the purposes of… science? I’ll compare the average of the 5 previous days against Product Hunt Day (PHD). For clarity here’s the timeline

Sat 12th September - Started coding The Hack Stack
Sun 13th September - Do more code and put it on Indie Hackers
Tue 15th September - More code done and put it on Reddit/r/SideProject and HN
Fri 18th September - Product Hunt day

Unique Visitors, Page Views etc

So remember this is the average numbers from the previous 5 days vs PHD.

Hmm… can’t add tables in SubStack. Bummer. Ok.

Visitors:
Pre-PHD: 271
On-PHD: 1,240

Page Views:
Pre-PHD: 1400
On-PHD: 3,700

So a 358% increase in visitors but only a 164% increase in page views.
Let’s dig into that.

On any given day on the run up to PHD each visitor looked at just over 5 pages (1400 / 271 = 5.17).

On PHD each visitor looked at just under 3 pages (3700 / 1240 = 2.98).

Interesting, and surprising. Does that reflect anywhere else? Let’s see.

Average Visit Duration:
Pre-PHD: 3m30s
On-PHD: 1m24s

Conclusion. The traffic from Product Hunt was much less engaged than the traffic I got through the week from Indie Hackers, HackerNews and Reddit. I definitely find this interesting and surprising.

Sign Ups & Conversion Rate

Sign Ups (per day):
Pre-PHD: 21
On-PHD: 133

Ok what does this mean? Well on a pre-PHD visitors converted to members at a 7.78% conversion rate and on PHD visitors converted to members at a 10.73% conversion rate.

Conclusion. Product Hunt traffic more likely to sign up. Is this because they need to sign up to post their own products? I don’t really know what to make if it.

Overall Summation

Has this changed my opinion of Product Hunt? Well no. I still like the site and I’ll still visit it every day. However my belief is still that unless you’re making something for makers (my previous 14 products were not built for makers) then you likely won’t get much traction there, and any traction you do get will be transient.

I’m grateful for the exposure and it was certainly exciting riding the wave of being on the PH podium, but I have to say that waking up to find I had finished 4th was bittersweet. For most of the day I was in 2nd position and then for the other portion of the day I had slipped into 3rd. This was absolutely fine as the product who took 2nd place had been really close beside me all day. In fact for most of the day there were only a handful of votes between us.

The reason it was bittersweet was because by the time I went to bed (UK time) there were only 6 or 7 hours left on the Product Hunt day and I was sat, comfortably, in 3rd place.

When I woke up, I saw I had been overtaken by a product who wasn’t even on the radar when I went to bed. It seems like they came from no-where very late in the day and jumped up to 3rd place. Strange, as every other product had been on a pretty steady trajectory all day and finished up roughly where it looked like they were going to finish up. Anyway…

What did I do to prepare for launch?

I read a lot of posts about prepping for PHD. Sadly I have to admit I didn’t do much. But what I did do is detailed below:

Shared with Indie Hackers a few days before
Shared with HackerNews and Reddit a few days before
Spent less than 5 mins on photoshop making a logo
Spent 0 minutes making images for the PH gallery; I took 2 random screen grabs
I posted about it on zero social networks
On launch day I emailed everyone who signed up over the previous 5 days; about 100 people

During the day I did do some things that I think are important

I started a thread on Indie Hackers about the launch day. This gained a lot of traction and was top of Indie Hackers for most of the day. I replied to every comment in there (pretty much) to stimulate engagement.
I replied to and upvoted every comment on Product Hunt.
I posted in r/sideproject again in the evening to get a little boost. This post got 105 upvotes and a bunch of comments.

Ok. Any questions to you can email me at the contact page on https://division77.com