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What we learned from our Product Hunt launch

We launched Receptive on Product Hunt yesterday. Until then we’d been in a “soft launch” phase, reaching out to people and showing them Receptive for feedback and validation.

Early Receptive customer and notorious product fiend, Matt Lanham of GeckoLabs is an established Product Hunter, with a decent following, so he was the guy to “find” us and he kindly posted about us early in the day.

I pinged my network with the link, asking for votes (with the wrong link, first time - don’t do that) and we got some early upvotes.

Soon after, I got an onboarding email from Product Hunt that said “don’t ask for upvotes”, but fuck, it was a bit late for that.

Our brothers and sisters from the Ignite accelerator, in particular, turned out in force - thanks guys.

We started out strong, floating around at 2nd or 3rd for a few hours, with 20 to 30 vistors to our site at any time - according to Google Analytics real-time.

Later on, as the USA woke up, we slipped down the board a little. We didn’t drop below 10 people on the site until we dropped below the fold after 12 hours and ~120 upvotes.

Making the most of it

We tried to make the most of this exposure by doing things that don’t scale

We got 150+ upvotes. Almost everyone that voted or commented, I followed on Product Hunt and Twitter, then tweeted a thank-you (sorry if I missed you).

This got a good number of conversations going, all of which I’m going to try to follow up properly on email in a day or two.

Every trial signup got a manual welcome email from me. We also reached out to everyone that signed up to the mailing list with something like “hey, what interests you about Receptive?”.

Every conversation was a potential source of feedback, or finding the pain points that customers identified with most strongly, or parts of our messaging that weren’t working.

We got some great, and encouraging feedback:

None of this scales. Most of it can be automated away, but its not time for that yet.

What we learned

Product Hunt is a great place to get talking to early adopters and product enthusiasts.

But its not just about “new products” any more, Product hunters are posting about new features on existing products and getting loads of upvotes. With such a valuable and influential community its not surprising that its being gamed pretty hard.

It would have been great to have topped the chart, but Receptive is a (proudly) unsexy B2B SaaS product, not a smartwatch or an iOS to-do list app.

Feedback that came up more than once from ProductHunt visitors:

  • Explainer video was too long (at 5 mins)
  • We got some objections on pricing, which were probably fair given that we are on an early iteration of our product.

Hopefully some of this is useful in your own Product Hunt launches. If you have any questions just ping me in the comments below.

Cheers!

Dan

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