We launched Alpe Audio a few months ago on Product Hunt and were #1 product of the day.
But was it worth it?
We put 70+ hours of work into our launch, and now a few months wanted to share learnings that weren't apparent in the beginning.
Right after our launch I summarized results in this blog post:
https://www.alpeaudio.com/post/i...
But now we're 5 months later and discovered more surprising benefits that aren't discussed anywhere: The compounding benefits to PH launches.
The TL:DR of the above post was that after our first launch we hit:
• 10,000+ eyeballs across website + social.
• 300 app downloads
• 20 new subscribers
But it's the future benefits that have been pretty remarkable & surprising: future launches are much better.
I initially thought of our Product Hunt launch as a ‘one and done’ type of event. But that was dead wrong!
In reality we have many products, and launching them is a great way to achieve distribution and early validation.
= many launches
Since our first launch, we've launched 2 new products. Most recently our Article to audio conversion kit - which was 🥈product of the day!
(
https://www.producthunt.com/post...)
The best part? We only worked for 2.5 hours on this launch. Not the 70+ we'd originally put in for the 1st one.
So we put in 2.5 hours of effort vs 70 for almost the same amount of results. But how?
This is the benefit of compounding launches.
In our first launch we struggled from three main problems:
1. Small community
2. No 'Product hunt' team
3. Lots of homework pre launch
1. Small community:
Our friends weren't active on PH, so their upvotes were penalized because they were new/non active accounts. That's no longer the case.
Now when they voted, their votes counted - which was huge.
2. No 'Product hunt' team
We didn't have a lot of active product hunters in our circle. The first launch helped us get in touch with many. Overtime we cultivated those relationships on/off PH, on Twitter & Slack/Discord.
For the next launches we had a team to help.
3. Lots of Homework!
There's lots of reading to do the first time around: how to launch, joining FB groups etc - all of that work is already done the 2nd & 3rd time around.
So much easier launches that are as good.
To wrap up: while the short term benefits of launching on Product Hunt were good, the long term compounding benefits have really blown me away.