24HourHomepage.com — Week 23 — What I learned as Product Hunt’s #2 Best Product Of The Day
tl;dr: I launched 24HourHomepage.com on Product Hunt this last Sunday and for 24 hours I responded to questions, invited more to discuss and ultimately earned the #2 Best Product of the Day
# Launch day
If you’re not familiar, Product Hunt (PH) is a product community to submit your products. Entrepreneurs love it. For 24 hours you get great feedback from other entrepreneurs on your idea. If they really like it, you may get upvoted into the top 5 products of the day and earn a shiny badge.
Like many “how to succeed with your PH launch” articles describe, I gave the launch the full day of my attention. From midnight to midnight. I took a nap from 5am-8am but more on that in a minute. The response was overwhelmingly positive and earned the #2 Best Product of the Day title. Nice.
Miriam Dorsett was kind enough to “hunt” the product for me. I wasn’t expecting anything more than her to post but throughout the day she championed my product. If you’re looking to launch on PH, reach out to Miriam!
For launch day, I had a spreadsheet of people and channels to announce the product in. That’s it. That and responding to feedback as soon as it came in was my launch strategy. It resulted in:
- page views: 850
- sales: 19
- new affiliates: 11
- new followers: 17
- impressions on twitter: 6,091
Which is not bad for someone without much of an audience!
# What I will do for next time
Two things:
- Use the full 24 hours, get more attention early
Those 3 hours I slept weren’t huge loss but the products that get seen most are more likely to get upvotes. So you want to get seen as early as possible, which means get “featured” on the front page as early as possible.
By the first minute of launch day it looked like other products had 10x the number of upvotes. Some folks were a little more prepared in the first minutes!
2. Precompile individual list of people to reach out to
My launch spread sheet was complete but somewhat vague. Some items were simply “reach out to everyone who follows me on twitter”. I would have saved some time if I compiled their URLs in a sheet and had the outreach message saved.
I would have done this for all channels I noted.
# This week
I want the affiliates who joined to promote the site to have the best chance they can at earning the full $24.7K I’m giving away. I’ll create some more tools to help them succeed. Also, after my PR efforts a few weeks ago some more agencies have reached out to discuss how they can help. I’ll be chatting with them.
# How you can help 👏👏👏
Question for you: What was your last public competition?
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Email: justin@24hourhomepage.com
Twitter: @justinprojects
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/higginsjustin/
Newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/higgins
Cell: (510) 393–6888
