As you may have seen, Quuu was featured on Product Hunt on Tuesday, November 3rd 2015, it was hunted by Eric Willis, to whom we are hugely grateful!! The whole Quuu team are massive fans and supporters of Product Hunt and have, ourselves, launched other products in the past as well as voted and commented on many hundreds of others. It’s a wonderful, positive and constructive environment on which to grow your startup, refine your offering and to discover exciting new products and connections!
The result? We only blinkin’ well came top didn’t we 🙂 Woohoo!
It was a fantastic day that flew by so quickly in a sociable whirlwind. We were excited to welcome so many awesome new users, who to our delight stopped by for a chat with us on the site as well as in the comments on Product Hunt!
We want other people to also enjoy the many powerful benefits that Product Hunt can bring, so here are a handful of tips that served us well on the day, and we believe are transferable to most companies who are planning on launching.
4 STEPS TO SUCCESS ON PRODUCT HUNT
Put in the ground work
“Fail to prepare, prepare to fail!” my school gym teacher screeched at me while I stood there wearing a pair of tennis trainers (that didn’t fit) for a rugby match. He was right, and it stuck with me. Indeed, it’s a concept that we’re all aware of, and there’s a good reason for that – preparation helps.
Before launching on Product Hunt we had let our existing core users know that we were going to be featured and we invited them to use this opportunity to discuss their experience of Quuu so far, and join the discussion to see how it could be improved. NOTE: do not, under any circumstance ask for upvotes, Product Hunt have a very clever algorithm that reflects the true support of the featured product. (read more about this here). Aside from which, where is the sense of satisfaction in forcing people to vote for you, it’s much nicer when they do it because they like the product and they wish to support you. After all, half the objective of a launch like this is gathering constructive feedback – so invite people to comment and discuss their expectations and experiences.
We also added a tailored welcome on our home page to all product hunters. We wanted them to know that we appreciated their support. Intercom.io makes this really easy!
We introduced a FAQ section to our website to answer the more common questions that people had.
We also added a small shaking interaction to our Sign Up For Free buttons to draw the eye to it and hopefully improve our conversion rate!
We cleared our calendars and dedicated the entire day to just answering questions from Product Hunters, tweets from followers and live chats from new website visitors. We didn’t want to miss a single message, within that hive of activity could well be a gem that transforms your business for the better – it’s essential that you value the importance of each and every interaction, which brings me on to my next point…
Be Attentive
You’re going to get a lot of comments, questions and suggestions, if you owned a shop and a customer approached you and started speaking to you, you wouldn’t listen to their first few words then walk off and make a cup of coffee, so don’t do that online either. Really listen to what people are saying, then interpret what’s at the core of their interactions.
To continue the same scenario of someone talking to you in a shop, you wouldn’t just listen to them, wait for them to finish then just walk off lol. You’d say thank you, or ask more questions. So my next tip is to not just like or upvote their comment but also react!
You’ll find that you get into far more productive and constructive conversations, that even engage other people. It’s an incredible opportunity that you should be thankful for. It’s the equivalent of having thousands of people come into your store and just give you heaps of constructive feedback – so don’t squander it, and above all be thankful
Product Hunt is a positive community, you’ll notice there’s no downvote facility, so buy into this ethos and be positive and happy yourself on there – we felt that the atmosphere should almost be like a cocktail party with an open invitation, lots of chatter, introductions, and polite conversation.
In short, be attentive (listen, interpret, react and be thankful) and you’ll get a truck-load more engagement than you’d have banked on. I think our comments stats would attest to that!
Use Leverage
Obviously, you’ll be getting lots of lovely new potential users visit your site on the day (and the few days after) and so you don’t want to miss out on making the most out of this. The way we leveraged the Product Hunt effect was to introduce a referrals system whereby users could unlock more posts per day by successfully referring new users, we setup messages to draw people’s attention to this, and to our delight 20% of all referrals were accepted, giving us a nice boost of new users, and increasing the value for the ones who referred their friends in the first place – Everyone’s a winner baby!
Secondly, we ran a social media competition, this requires little, to no effort, but can really help engagement on social media. We added a click to tweet button on the welcome email and announced that we’d award 10 free lifetime amazing plans to lucky winners who tweeted it (where you have access to unlimited interest categories and up to 10 posts per day). It’s a nice bit of marketing because it requires almost zero time out of your Product Hunt schedule, but keeps things boiling over on twitter!
Lastly, both during and after Product Hunt you’ll likely receive a few requests to guest blog and/or do interviews, make sure you respond to these requests and leverage accessing new and unchartered audiences! All these techniques will maximise and prolong the new influx of users signing up to your site, so don’t hold back!
Remove Barriers
The last thing you want is to go on Product Hunt, attract new potential users, then have them leave without signing up because you’re asking for a sign-up fee. So at the very least if you don’t have a free tariff normally, then it’s recommendable to introduce a free trial period. This way you’ll see the true value of getting feedback from the Product Hunt community.
SO HOW DID QUUU DO?
THE STATS OVERVIEW
A quick snapshot of the stats – bang on 1,000 more users in 7 days
Bar chart showing the sign-up situations before, during and after
This graph puts the growth into context (although hadn’t caught up fully with the live stats at time of screenshot)
A glance at our analytics
For more information about our Product Hunt trends, visit the following link http://phtrend.com/rank/20151103.
Headlines
- 128% user base growth in the first 24 hrs and 380.11% after 7 days!
- 18.6% referral invitations acceptance rate
- We received 238 mentions on Twitter for @Quuu_co in the week after PH
- We also went into the PH list for top Twitter Apps https://www.producthunt.com/e/apps-for-your-twitter (in 2nd spot of 22 shortlisted at time of writing)
- We participated in over 114 conversations on our website and 102 comments on Product Hunt across the 7 days since we were featured.
- Our social media competition reached 38,462 people and we awarded 10 free lifetime Amazing Plans to lucky users who participated 🙂 Read more about this on our blog!
As you can see Quuu has benefited enormously from launching on Product Hunt and we are continuing to see the effects. The biggest benefit has been the feedback consensus that it’s allowed us to build so quickly. We’re so fortunate with how helpful our users are in giving us advice and support on how things are going, with a Quuumunity like this we can’t help but improve in leaps and bounds!
ThanQuuu to Product Hunt, our Quuusers, Quuurators and Product Hunters! We’d love to hear about your experiences of Product Hunt and if you have any tips that you’d like to share then please tell us all about them in the comments!
