We became a Mobile App of the Year on Product Hunt — so what?
I’ve recently seen some pretty polarizing opinions about the launch on Product Hunt. Someone says that they find leads and even investors on PH, someone says that it’s a waste of time on the local geek community. Therefore, I decided to share our experience with the platform and the benefits we gain.
To give you the context. We’re building EduDo — a community-driven platform with short, interactive, insightful videos. We soft launched at the end of December, and decided to also launch on Product Hunt. The main goal was to get some traffic and possibly make it easier to speak with tech media.
The preparation process took us several hours, fortunately, there were enough materials and graphics. All we had to do was to write a good description of the product and spend some time to spread the word about the launch around our network.
Our Product Hunt journey was as follows: 4th Product of the Day, 1st Product of the Week, 2nd Product of the Month and the winner in “Mobile App of the Year” nomination.
Interestingly, we got much more value than we originally planned:
1. about a thousand installs (in waves after each of the stages). Yes, a significant part of them were not from our target geographies (USA, Canada), but it’s already not bad;
2. several dozen very detailed and useful feedbacks (yes, geeks can also have interesting and non-standard opinions — surprise!);
3. we daily receive inquiries from people who want to shoot content on our platform;
4. a couple of dozen people wrote to me to start working in EduDo;
5. I received dozen inquiries from new potential investors (and some of them are very well-known — surprise![2]).
And we spent several hours to gain all this. As for me, it’s quite decent. And I have not yet mentioned more immeasurable factors, like, for example, increasing the team’s motivation.
In the bottom line, PH is a good additional PR tool. I’m not sure if it makes sense to invest a lot of time in it and put it in top-priority, but if you follow the Pareto principle, the result can be very surprising.
Of course I’m not stating that our particular case shows that Product Hunt will be helpful for everyone. This is definitely not the case. But I think that for b2c, c2c and some b2b projects (for example, work efficiency tools), the platform can be useful.
Wish you only thoughtful decisions and focusing on the essence!
