On Sunday, August 2nd – NinjaOutreach went live on Product Hunt.
Now, if you’re not familiar with Product Hunt, it’s kind of like a sub reddit specifically featuring cool new products.
And, as you would imagine, they have a big audience – getting featured on Product Hunt can easily send you thousands of visitors and sign ups.
As for us, in the two months following our submission to Product Hunt, we received nearly 1k visits and over 50 signups!
Product Hunt visitors converted at around 5%, or twice as much as a regular website visitor.
Here’s how it all happened.
Stage 1: Getting Submitted To Product Hunt
It’s not doubt that this was a very purposeful marketing campaign, and did not happen by accident.
Product Hunt is big, and we knew we wanted to be featured.
But there was one problem – Product Hunt is a highly curated community and only select people who have spent months engaging and participating in the community have the right to submit products. I could not just submit NinjaOutreach to PH, I had to find an influencer.
I decided to implement the strategy that Matthew talks about here.
Essentially, you find people who are engaged in the community and tweet to them to see if they would be interested in checking out your product. Naturally, this is a segue to getting featured.
Although we typically do email outreach, we have no problem asking a few people kindly on Twitter if they would consider us. We sent tweets out like the following:
@erictwillis – would you be interested in submitting NinjaOutreach.com to PH? Would love to show it to you!
Eventually, after a few dozen asks, we got some hits – two people agreed to look at the product, and one person ended up submitting it.
Like all outreach, it took time and persistence, but after a few weeks, NinjaOutreach was on Product Hunt!
Stage 2: The Aftermath
Admittedly, this was not a flawlessly executed Product Hunt strategy. In fact I’d say it was all around very poor, and yet we still managed to capitalize on it fairly well.
The product was submitted on Sunday at around 6PM EST, while I was at the gym, a relatively poor time to be featured, because most of the other products that are in your bracket (i.e the Sunday ones), have been on there for the whole day and have already received a lot of exposure and upvotes.
NinjaOutreach was the last one to get submitted that day and started at a pitiful 1 upvote, while the top one already had over 200!
Additionally, it was submitted without any images or a proper description. Doh!
I rushed home from the gym to see if I could salvage the last 6 hours of the night, and after a few hours was able to get access to edit the listing and get in contact with a few supporters to help bump us up a bit.
We never made it even close to the top, but at least we made a showing.
IMPORTANT: Do not send people directly to your link to upvote it, they have to go to the home page and find it, then upvote it. This can tank your rankings, as several people pointed out to me. I certainly made this mistake.
Stage 3: The Dust Settles
Many of the visitors who come from Product Hunt are just interested in taking a look – they’re curious, kind of like Reddit.
According to our tracking, this resulted in about 50 sign ups, which is probably over $2k in lifetime customer value.
Additionally, it was just great exposure as 1k people visited the site and became acquainted with us.
A few people even sent us emails like the following:
Why This Worked
As with many outreach strategies, there is nothing particularly fancy about what we did.
First, we decided that one marketing goal was going to be to get featured on Product Hunt.
Next, we identified influencers in the Product Hunt community, and kindly asked them to take a look at our product. If they liked what they saw, they could submit it, benefiting them by being the ones who introduce valuable products to the community.
Beyond that, we had a product and a website that was ready to take 1k visitors and convert them into sign ups and eventually paid customers.
As you can see, once we set our minds to getting featured, we achieved it within two weeks and just a few hours of work.
