Numeracy's Product Hunt Launch

October 26th, 2018

Last week, I had the privilege of being part of a successful Product Hunt launch, hitting the #1 product of the day. I’m not going to talk about the process of posting; read the Product Hunt post on this. It’s good. I also greatly enjoyed Flow Chat’s discussion of their launch.

Attribution

Here are our numbers:

• 832 upvotes
• 7,486 unique visitors
• 1,073 signups

The visitor to signup converation rate is impressive (13%), though I attribute this more to Product Hunt’s audience than any uniquely strong marketing on our part. Of the thousand signups, only 53% of those were directly attributable to Product Hunt. Around 45% actually had no referrer headers, showing that a LOT of people either have referrer obfuscation or prefer typing directly into the address bar.

I’ve always struggled with attribution, in particular, with event sponsorships/boothing or podcast ads. I’ve seen great results from both at Sentry, but both were hard to concretely measure. Probably worth applying this intuition to online communities broadly, maybe online advertising (though unclear).

Engagement

Product Hunt users do not respond to bulk emails. I emailed a templated “welcome email” for 20 of our most engaged users and only 1 got back to me, felt very hit-or-miss. However, users I wrote more personal emails got back at a >50% rate (personal subject line in particular). The Product Hunt crowd seems particularly resilient to automated marketing (probably because they are inundated with it). However, a huge number went through our “Getting Started” queries.

If you’re curious about other numbers, ping me on Twitter @ehfeng!