Content Snare is a tool for gathering content from clients. It's aimed at digital agencies, designers and people that are plagued my clients taking forever to send information. Last Thursday, it went live on Product Hunt (PH). Like every good SaaS boy should, I’d planned the launch (nowhere near as meticulously as some others) in advance. This can be a massive undertaking, but it not need be. We’ll get into that later. That morning of launch, I got up early to chat with our “hunter.” This is active PH user chosen to submit on our behalf. I had everything ready for her in advance. So then it was time to try to get word out. One by one, I went through my launch checklist. First came messaging everyone who had agreed to share. Then posting in some Facebook groups & all our social profiles. Finally, out went an email to our list. And then... I went back to my usual daily stuff and mostly forgot about it. (You know… aside from the refreshing every 10 minutes to see how many upvotes we had.) To be honest I didn’t think we had much of a chance, and not much would come of it. Twelve hours later, lying on the couch with my girlfriend, halfway through an episode of Archer... I took a look at the Product Hunt homepage.
“Holy shit… we’re number 2...”
“...behind Facebook” ????????
Well that was unexpected. Thanks to timezones, right as I was going to bed here in Australia, the West coast of the USA was just waking up. We’d already started seeing a ton of tweets about Content Snare, comments were coming in, and people were signing up and submitting support requests. Nothing too crazy though - totally manageable by one guy. The next three days saw about 5,000 new website visits and around 100 trial signups. That’s about a 6x increase in traffic and 10x of signups. Not too shabby.
Planning The Launch
The rest of this post is meant for others going through their own PH launch. Probably a bit boring for the rest of you! Below is my “pre-launch checklist”. The sub-points are my notes from afterwards.
- Finding an active ‘hunter’ to post for us
- Thanks Kim Doyal, you’re the best
- Creating a Dropbox folder of everything needed to create the listing
- Preparing the site to scale to handle traffic spikes
- In hindsight, this wasn’t really that important. 5k hits isn’t server breaking
- Creating a Product Hunt specific landing page and discount code
- Also probably not required. We did this, but an error in the listing meant that no one even saw it
- Contacting other people in my circles that could share with their audiences, or were happy for me to share in their groups
- In reality, this was months in planning. I had been virtually networking with ‘influencers’ in the web design space by contributing to their groups, going on their podcasts and just getting to know them
- Getting involved in other software or marketing groups where Product Hunt launches were shared
- Identifying Product Hunt collections where Content Snare would be a good fit (e.g. “Tools for Designers)
- In the end, I chickened out of this as I didn’t want to be “that guy” tweeting people asking for something with no value proposition in return
- Planning a time to chat to our hunter and submit the listing
And then, the launch day checklist:
- Meet with Kim on Facebook messenger & send her the dropbox link to get the submission created - this was 7am Australian Eastern, 5pm EST
- Contact the ~10 people I’d spoken to earlier that were going to help me share in their groups or profiles
- Share the link, with a customised post and/or question in each Facebook group that I’d previous cleared with the admins. Did NOT ask for upvotes.
- 3 web design groups
- 3 SaaS groups
- 1 other group
- Share the link in relevant Slack groups
- My coworking group and a WordPress group
- Push out the link to all our social profiles with Buffer
- Post in our own Facebook Group for web designers
- Post on my personal Facebook
- Send out the link to our email list
- Added to my PH collection Tools For Web Designers
- Be available for PH comments/questions, Facebook notifications and customer support (respond to ALL of them)
That't it 🙂
People who are amazing and helped with the launch in one of many ways
(And people you should check out if you're a web designer/developer)
- Kim Doyal - The WordPress Chick
- Erin Flynn - Erin Flynn
- Lee Jackson - Angled Crown
- Christine Thatcher - Designing To Delight
- Josh Hall - JoshHall.co
- Sampath - Sampath Speaks
- Cath Hughes - LiveBy5
- Nathan Wrigley - wpBuilds
<3 you all Also got a decent supply of tips from the SpreadShare post on Medium.
Well, we got hunted unexpected today. Our side project Wireflow which was left in dust, in bugs, was hunted today. It’s still #1 product of the day on PH , even with all that bad user experience