Our ProductHunt launch: what we’ve learned + our complete results

On December 8, 2021, we've launched our first campaign on Product Hunt with a simple goal: to share our new Free NPS offer with the world. This part of our product is now free and we wanted as many people to be aware of it and to understand why we were doing that.

We've learned a lot from this experience, and we believe that this experience can be useful to other startups that would also like to launch on PH in the future. So today we're sharing our complete and transparent feedback with you, to show you our production steps, our results and what we've learned in the process.

What is Product Hunt?

Product Hunt is an online community of early adopters and product enthusiasts, always eager to discover new tools and share their feedback with their creators. Founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013, its members can vote for their favourite new products and a Top 10 is compiled every day. In recent years, it has become the place to highlight new product launches, make important announcements and find first users.

Why a Product Hunt campaign?

Since we already have customers and are not looking for our first users, you may wonder why we've decided to create a Product Hunt campaign. Actually, it’s because we've wanted to reach a broader audience than the one we were addressing until now. And in a competitive field like ours, being on top of the mind of your targets is sometimes hard so a platform like Product Hunt is a great way to regularly talk about your new and impactful features and offers.

The launch of the Product Hunt campaign allows us to be visible to people who don't know us, but it also allows us to emphasize our message to our targets who may not vote for us, as not everyone uses Product Hunt, but who will still have seen what we have to say. The actions to get upvotes that won’t generate upvotes will still be useful as ways to make our message heard.

Moreover, we wanted to highlight the Free NPS, to show the world that there is a free NPS solution, and that they no longer need to pay for such a tool. This is a goal in itself for us, as sign ups or scheduled demos. We really want to say that NPS, today, is used by everyone yet too limited. Our mission is to give people a voice at the best time, in the best place and on the right device throughout their user journey. To do this, a Free NPS solution with no response or user limitation is one of the best ways to express the real value of user feedback. So we've wanted as many users as possible to be aware of our positioning.

Preparation: how to be ready for Product Hunt?

To maximise the impact of this campaign, we've prepared a plan of attack with actions for every member of the team. Indeed, to succeed in a Product Hunt launch, you need to have a maximum number of votes and comments in less than 24 hours. So you can't improvise, that's why we’ve come prepared!

First of all, we set up a Trello Board, listing all our actions, in order to visualise the different missions we had to carry out and to divide the work in the team. In that kind of operation, you need coordinated actions, and each of us had to follow a clear plan to achieve our objectives. This board was the heart of our collaboration.

One of our key tasks was the creation of various videos, to present in detail how our offer works: one presenting the feature, another from our CEO, a video in French for our local audience… We've also produced all the required visuals for PH, with an animated gif thumbnail, the screenshots of the product, as well as the tagline and a detailed description of what our new feature offers.

We've also created videos of testimonials from some of our customers, who talk about our product and more specifically about this offer, to share how they use it and what benefits they get from using it. We have also created blog posts on the subject, to demonstrate the importance of NPS Free, our vision on the subject, and to promote the campaign in the process. This way, people coming to the website had access to various useful and rich content, reinforcing our messaging. And we also wrote newsletters for our users asking them to share this new offer and inviting them to support us on PH.

Finally, we've looked for something essential when launching a Product Hunt campaign: a hunter. The hunter is the person who will publish your product on the platform. Ideally, it’s someone who has a large following, which allows for a much greater impact on the platform more quickly. People will be notified that they’ve posted something on PH and so the relevance and size of the audience is key. In our case, Thibaud Elziere, the co-founder of eFounders and one of our investors, accepted to play that role!

The actual campaign

The d-day! At 9:01 am (GTM +1), the countdown starts for 24 hours and your campaign is live. Everyone now has access to the fruits of our labour of the last few weeks, and the goal is now to gather as many votes as possible.

This is when you send the newsletter to your users, so that they could vote for your campaign. We've also shared our blog posts and our videos on social media and targeted online communities (Slack, Facebook Groups, etc) where our targets are but also where people that could be keen to support us were.

We kept our partners informed by email for them to share the campaign as well and shared the news in Product Wednesday, our newsletter about new tools for Product Teams.

Last, but not least, we also sent an email to every person we’ve talked to during the past 12 months about Screeb, also to ask for their support. But it was also a great way to restart the conversation with them and book new demos with some of them!

Activating all those networks and posting all these content helped us to create a “snowball effect” and to be visible outside these circles and reach the first positions on PH pretty quickly.

The results

At the end of the day, the results were in: we’ve reached the 6th place and been n°5 in terms of votes with about 320 upvotes, 85 comments and 6 reviews!

We've achieved some important goals for us. First of all, to finish in the Top 10. This result was very important for us, as it means that you’ll be listed in the daily newsletter of Product Hunt which has a lot of subscribers!

In addition, we were able to generate traffic to our site, as well as new sign ups for our product. 150% more accounts created on December 8th than during the complete month of November, with a 30% conversion rate between traffic on our website and sign ups. Our Slack channel where our new sign-ups appear has been heavily used this day!

And for us, the greatest success has been the number of positive comments we’ve received. And beyond the numbers, we had the opportunity to push our message and our vision to a larger audience.

What we’ve learned

We had a really good experience with this first Product Hunt campaign. We've really learned a lot from it, especially about how Product Hunt works.

For the next time, we have several good practices in mind:

Prepare all our materials very well in advance, so that they are as clear and attractive as possible and for your team not to have to think about or produce content on D-Day. Everything must be ready and actionable.
Find a hunter who can advise you and who can your product in a more effective way than you would
Don't forget who the voters are, which is very important for the weight of the votes. It is important to try to have a balance between new and experienced users of Product Hunt.
And, of course, have a great product, because being promoted is not enough, nor to have a good preparation or a good hunter. At the end, people will judge your product and only your product.

We are really happy about this campaign because it helped us to increase our visibility and awareness, and boost the creation of new accounts. We also received a lot of qualified comments from users, which allows us to improve our product every day. We’ve booked a lot of demos with new companies and restarted conversations with ones we’ve talked to in the past. Moreover, all the support we received really warmed our hearts, and pushed us even more to surpass ourselves to offer a perfect product to our users.

We've really enjoyed this experience, which opened our eyes to many things, and gave us a big boost for our development. We will definitely do new Product Hunt launches in the future, as we think it’s been a great success for us!