On ProductHunt launch numbers

ProductHunt is an amazing platform for launching a product. It has brought Templatery the first users and exposure (~9000 visitors in total so far) back in July when Templatery ranked as the #1 Product of the day. This post dives into the graph below and outlines what traffic can you expect both short-term and long-term (each dot on the graph is a single day).

Disclaimer: This is based on my experience with launching a single product on ProductHunt. Please take it with a grain of salt.

Launch day

On the launch day, roughly 3000 visitors came to Templatery (which ranked as the #1 product). Spanning across the whole week, this will total to around 6000 visitors. The orange graph has specifically filtered users with producthunt.com as a referrer, the blue one is the total. Besides publishing a single medium article and a couple of tweets, I did not engage in any way with the growth, so I believe one can use the blue graph as the total effect of sharing caused by ProductHunt.

You can expect the spike to last for about a week. If you don't capitalize on the new influx of visitors, the number can easily go flat afterwards. Even if you do something as simple as a link to a Typeform, it's well worth it. I have simply pasted a form link to the landing and got 80 emails which formed a basis for Templatery's email campaign.

Long-term visitors

There are a myriad of other activities I tried for growth after the ProductHunt launch, so it would not be entirely fair to count all users. Therefore, below is a short summary of the long-term amount of visitors who have producthunt.com as a referrer.

• Week 2 to Week 4 after the launch yields around 150 visitors per week.
• Week 4 to Week 6 after the launch yields around 100 visitors per week.
• Week 6 to Week 11 (current week) after the launch yields consistently 50 visitors per week. I am surprised by this number, I would have thought this would eventually die out, but it's staying steady.

My advice for the launch

First of all, ProductHunt is visited by a specific demographic. The typical featured product is likely targeted towards indie-hackers, startups, designers or anything productivity related (looking at you note-taking apps). You will have a hard time trying to promote your Kubernetes secrets management solution, or anything that's not relevant to the startup/indie-hacker community. Knowing this, you should ask yourself if you can perhaps retarget your product's message or whether to invest time into ProductHunt at all.

Other than that, there are a couple of quick wins:

• Write a nice comment about yourself and a story behind the product.
• Have an extremely short tagline (the tagline for Templatery was 5 words: Templates for your Figma presentations).
• Don't cheap out on the images. They are by far the largest thing a visitor sees, so try to make it understandable what people get when they visit your site. However, no need to overthink it with the amount, I have used just 2 images.
• Engage with the comments. It's a nice personal touch.
• Share it with friends to upvote, or use your community to help you boost the launch.

Conclusion

That's probably all about my brief relationship with ProductHunt. Without it, Templatery would have a hard time gaining traction, but it's important to realise that the users who visit ProductHunt might not always be the target audience.