Hey everyone,
At Flexiple, we have been working on Scale, since April. We finally launched it officially last week and had a lot of hopes pinned on Product Hunt, like most of us makers do.
Product Hunt, not very reliable? 🤔
But the Product Hunt launch failed. It was quite bizarre, to be honest. Overall, PH as a platform seems to lesser and lesser reliable to me. Single page articles are launched as products and end up doing well, while genuine products seem to be languishing.
Reddit the saviour! 🙌
Nevertheless, just when our shoulders were drooping, we posted it on Reddit in the InternetisBeautiful subreddit and it just went crazy! Upvotes just started flowing in and we ended up with:
=> 24,500 upvotes
=> 700+ comments
=> 150,000 traffic
All this in just 24 hours 😬
Here's a screenshot of the same:
Overall, a lesson for me (and possibly for you?) 😇
I think we need to really diversify our launch strategy from Product Hunt to other platforms. I am not saying that I won't launch on PH again - of course, I will. But I will spend less energy on it and instead work on finding other avenues too.
Anything else, you have learnt that you would like to share? Please do 🙏
Here's what our users had to say:
Kevin Simons said "This is really interesting. I suspect it has a lot to do with who hangs out in ProductHunt. When we launched Kitemaker in ProductHunt, we actually launched a bit earlier than we meant to due to some clicking mistakes. We were still able to scrape together a lot of votes and make it pretty high up on the list despite not having been hunted, etc. I think that's because our product speaks directly to product managers and influencers in the product development sphere and therefore it was able to gain some traction on its own. Your product maybe appeals more to the designer or the small entrepreneur team that wants some great looking content for their landing page, etc. PS - your illustrations are great! If I'm honest, I'm pretty sick of the cartoon character on a SaaS landing page thing, but yours are seriously nice."
Karthik Sridharan said "Hey Kevin, That's quite interesting and really happy that it was a successful launch for you all things considered. The thing is that I think Scale did get a lot of upvotes but it just did a sudden dive in rank from #2 to #8. I have seen this happen earlier and I think it has to do with some "spam trigger". I find it quite funny that the upvotes I get from PH's own users makes PH adjudge it as spam. Nevertheless, I think PH is still a good channel, just not the same it was before. Also, I think Reddit saved the day for me. I would really urge you to look at the subreddit I have suggested. I will share others too if I find them to be useful. P.S. Thanks for the kind words :). I agree - landing pages with just characters can be annoying. The idea is to use these tastefully."