Here's what happened when Contentools (a Content Marketing Platform) got featured on Product Hunt (a platform for launching new products, apps, api's, etc..)
3. Learning
PH is not the only place to launch a product but, after studying a lot about the market and analyzing every
possible scenario, we've decided to go with PH because of its usability and the results it has provided to other
companies. Besides that, we found out that behind a successful PH launch, there's much more than submitting
your product. There were a lot of awesome materials and knowledge that other founders shared.
Here's our favorite ones:
- The Product Hunt manual
- How product hunt really works
- How I launched the #1 most upvoted product of all time on Product Hunt.
- Product Hunt Handbook
- Quora Topic: Product Hunt
Extra Resources:
- An app that alerts you whenever your company is mentioned
- Product Hunt Analytics
4. Create awareness
In order to have people voting for Contentools on PH, they first needed to know about its existence. A couple
of weeks before our launch, we started to mention about PH in some of our social media and blog posts. That
made our followers also get to know about PH.
www.contentools.com
5. Find your Hunter/Maker
It's already well known that if someone with more followers, bigger influence and higher reach post your
product, you can get better results. So we started to analyze who, among our connections, could help us get
further.
www.contentools.com
The man
himself
6. Getting Ready
We decided the day and time of our launch based on the success of previous launches. The day/time chosen
was Thursday (higher traffic) at 1am PST (PH only features your product for 24 hours).
www.contentools.com
7. Blurb
As no one will never know as much about your biz than the members and founders, it's appropriate to create a
blurb to be distributed and posted by your hunter. Here's ours:
www.contentools.com
8. Discount
We have also created a special pricing condition for Product Hunters. Everyone who was willing to give it a trial,
would receive a 25% discount during the first six months of usage. In exchange for their feedback on how we
could make it a better product.
www.contentools.com
code:
PHCoupon
9. Getting Ready
Our marketing team participated helping on social media. Considering that you are not allowed to ask for votes
(which is fair) we created some arts that were kind and that could be easily shared.
www.contentools.com
11. Launch Time
Our maker/hunter - @writerpollock - posted our product, highlighting the founders - @emilia_chagas
@eltonmiranda_ @pedrocli - and their journeys with the company
www.contentools.com
12. Spread the word
Of course, we leveraged our own resources spreading the word of the launch among a) everyone in our
company b) the content professionals in our marketplace and c) our followers*. *note that, according to PH
guidelines, it's not 'ok' to ask for votes. Keep that in mind to avoid getting penalized.
www.contentools.com
13. Influencers
Also, we used twitter to reach out to active content marketers to introduce ourselves as a valuable asset to
them. This action drove great engagement from our target audience, after all, people recognise when you are
adding value and not just being spammy.
www.contentools.com
14. On Duty
As founders, we divided our tasks to make sure that at least one of us would be online during the following 24
hours. In other words, each of us had stayed on duty for 6 hours answering comments, retweeting, liking
comments and getting the most out of our time.
www.contentools.com
16. Results
www.contentools.com
VOTES: 466
2nd most voted launch of the day
1st most voted web app
VISITORS: 1074
43% conversion rate
An increase of 80% in our avg. daily visitors
NEW TRIALS: 117
11% conversion rate
90% above our avg. daily new trials until then
18. Onboarding
We learned that different company profiles need, not only a different pricing, but a
different onboarding. Once you decide to make your process as touchless as possible,
personalization becomes an important key. You won't be able to treat every lead,
every trial and every customer the same way because of the simplest reason ever: they
are not the same!
www.contentools.com
21. Pricing Strategy
Our pricing strategy used to be based on the number of seats and different ranges
according to feature access. After the feedback, we realized that people didn't
actually know what they would need before trying the product and they'd have a "not-
so-easy" choice to predict how much they would pay for the tool.
www.contentools.com
24. Testimonials
www.contentools.com
We did acquire customers through this launch but mainly, we gained some amazing
feedback along the way. The results were improvements all over our solution. But one
of the biggest benefits for me was seeing how happy we made content managers who
were already using Contentools!