Worth noting is that this was essentially number one on product hunt, above all other items.
Meaning, the product hunt results shown are the absolute best result you could hope for and most users will receive a far smaller amount of visits. PH gets a bit of hype because its invite only and people assume it has a big impact, but for most folk it would be much more impactful for their launch to even be on a smaller tech blog like Read/write or recode.
For the average person who gets on PH and gets the normal amount of upvotes (around 10-20 ) you can expect a blistering 250-500 visits. You would get more traction just posting a comment in a HN article. PH seems more powerful because its invite only and has tons of hype around it, but it does not deliver on results yet.
Surprised that HN numbers were so high, but not surprised that Techcrunch was number one. They still have a great share of the market when it comes to initial exposure.
A good rule of thumb with Hacker News is that you get 90-100 unique visitors for every upvote on a post given that it hits the front page. (as someone whose blog has hit the top of HN multiple times, I can attest to this)
The app received 6100 hits with 76 HN points, so that's a good estimate.
I'm not a fan of Product Hunt because it's an echo chamber personified. It's what happened to Quora, and I don't think that strategy will work twice.
Based on my relatively small sample size (a couple of times on HN frontpage and TC), a feature about a utility like this that sits on the Lifehacker homepage for any significant amount of time will demolish the sources mentioned here in terms of actual resulting usage.
It's also worth noting that these services do not live in a vacuum. People seeing the story on Hacker News may well have later seen the story on Techcrunch but skipped over it. I read all three websites daily so I would be counted where I simply saw the story first.
The most important lesson to learn from this successful "launch" is that they iterated on their product for seven months of beta before officially launching it. How often do you see "Show HN's" of half-finished side projects with no actual customers? All the time. And the feedback is rarely good. Even if it is, the percent of qualified leads will likely be drastically lower than if you release a refined product, since people will quickly realize its rough state and promptly forget about your product.
The lesson is here to chillllll. Wait. Hold on. You don't need to "launch" your product as soon as v1 is deployed to Heroku. HN, product hunt, and Techcrunch will still be here in seven months. Don't waste your window of opportunity for "launching" by announcing an extremely rough, underdeveloped product. Hold out until you have customer feedback and have refined it sufficiently. Then, the leads you get will be infinitely more valuable.
I know you're talking about product launches, but you reminded me of something I've been wanting to clarify about Show HN. I hope it's ok if I share it here. It's not exactly off-topic, since Show HN is definitely for product launches—but it's for other things too.
The way Show HN has evolved over the years, the bar for it is naturally low. Show HN is for something you've made that other people can try out and talk with you about in the thread. That can be anything from a first project or weekend hack to a feedback-honed product like you've described above. The only rules are (a) you made it and (b) it works.
By "it works" I mean that it isn't a landing page or an email signup or a fundraiser, but rather something other people can play with and give feedback and ask questions about. That definitely includes new products, but also other things. Who knows what people might come up with! It just has to be interesting.
A risk with setting the bar too high is that some users will feel like contributing isn't for them. We want to avoid that. There are many talented people who maybe haven't done anything of their own yet, or haven't yet shared what they've done, or who suffer from that curse of our field, impostor syndrome. It's painfully easy to look at the polished work of others and think, "I could never do that". One reason we want Show HN to be welcoming to all levels of work is so there will be plenty of examples where people think, "I could do that". Not as in "meh, that's nothing," but in the DIY spirit of "hey, me too".
But the main reason is that many kinds of things—including seemingly trivial things—can be interesting. There's a secret relationship between the high and the low. They thrive together.
Masterful paintings are wonderful but first sketches are interesting too, especially in a workshop or a studio, which is the kind of place we want HN to be. Besides, first sketches have a way of turning into something masterful later. Most won't, but some will, and we love it when HN helps that happen.
Maintaining control of your launch is important as well.
I recall seeing discussion on Product Hunt recently where founders were worried about their product being submitted without their knowledge, effectively launching them before they're ready in a beta/soft launch state.
Obviously that would be bad, but it's potentially even worse, because (as far as I know) you only get one shot at Product Hunt.
If this has actually happened or not, I'm not sure. There were a lot of founders worried about it though.
Per the discussion, I believe rrhoover said they're looking into ways to address that, and the prevailing consensus was to lock down your beta. Some other ideas were additional provisions in beta tester NDAs, and Product Hunt implementing some type of blacklist system to prevent premature submissions.
Personally I would just have a bare minimum public-facing website during beta, though it seems that this would inhibit your ability to get beta users unless you're either well connected or your product is hyped.
Of course, this same phenomenon has been happening with HN for years now, the difference being it's much more rare because HN isn't laser-focused on new products, and its submission volume is massive.
My product (www.machete.io) has been on both HN and PH in the past week. Its hard to measure HN because rel=nofollow => no referrer in google analytics. Also, our HN post wasn't specifically about our product, but rather a visualization of seed funding by accelerators (machete lets you easily create interactive pivot charts). PH was more focused specifically about machete.
HN: ~10K sessions, 293 requests for beta access, on a Tuesday+Wednesday
PH: ~1800 sessions, 495 requests for beta access, on a Friday+Saturday
I have a very hard time separating out HN's impact long term because of the no referrer, PH doesn't do that and from last friday to tonight (wednesday), we've gotten a total of 2,687 visitors from PH and 709 signups (yes, a 27% conversion rate). We got even more indirect signups from PH via tweets that I don't think we would have gotten otherwise.
I don't know how things would have been different if my HN post was specifically geared at telling HN about Machete and our data visualizations instead of just a sample visualization we made. Had tons of PH readers email me asking about specific features, if we were looking for funding and when they could actually get into the beta. Didn't really have that at all with HN. Although I would say that we had equal numbers of VCs from HN and PH sign up (assuming they didn't use their gmail account)
A bit off-topic, but it's not the "nofollow" that leaves you with no referrer in analytics, it's SSL.
HN forces HTTPS and your page is HTTP. The browser never sends a referrer when you follow a link from an encrypted site to an unencrypted site, so you can loose quite a bit of data in analytics by not using HTTPS since more and more inbound links will be from encrypted traffic.
Add HTTPS to www.machete.io and you'll get better data.
Are your customers likely to be other startups or related companies? If not, then probably none of the above. "Wherever your customers hang out" is the right answer.
For instance, I've had LiberWriter on the front page a few times, and it basically does not convert, at all. Most people here can make their own eBooks without problems. Our target market are self-published authors who are not at all technical and need some help.
I've found HN to be a high quality community. There is a higher concentration of people that can give you meaningful feedback when you post your product under a Show HN. Product Hunt on the other hand seems to get you really useless feedback. Product hunt just feels like it belongs to a clique, is way too hyped up and lacks substance .
To be fair, I do think product hunt brings in a tiny amount of traffic.
We have a long way to go to reach HN-level numbers but I think we're doing OK, considering Product Hunt's been around for ~8 months. I shared more numbers earlier in this thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7981057
Above all I enjoy the diversity and intellect of the perspectives within HN comments. It's truly a special place with a high caliber of valuable exchange.
Except for the few startups that consider tech power users as their demographic, I think it's naive and counterproductive for many of them to put so much time into getting their links on these sites. If they put the same effort into getting their product in front of their actual customers they would stand to benefit much more.
HN/TC/... are good to show a new product to people that want to see new products. Thats it.
That did not mean that you get customers or a wider audience.
One year ago i launch http://apidocjs.com (OpenSource for RESTful API documentation), i show it to HN and got 2.500 Visitors in one day (yeah!), but the next days nearly zero.
Further development and step by step more users find their way to apiDoc -> organic growth.
I'm the little guy in the story. 300 followers on twitter, only just starting to develop a name for myself.
I launched theNews ios (http://bit.ly/thenews-ios) recently which basically lets you read Hacker News & designer news in one app.
You'd think that would go down well in HN but nope, it faded into the bowels of HN & im not surprised. There is so much content due to how "open" it is.
Meanwhile people auctually took notice of my app on PH & DN because u dont't entirely need points to be relevant due to the moderate number of submissions. Frankly a better system for the little guy.
Show HN has its place for hacks & product launches while PH is like a brilliant way to launch your product & get feedback from amazing people that you look up to
& i don't think PH is tryna be like Show HN, it's doing its own thing. giving its own spin on Show HN.
All communities can't be open & frnakly the number of products on PH is already overwhelming at its current amount & with more its only gonna get more where it just becomes impossible to keep up. Thats probably the biggest challenge PH faces.
it's a nice alternative to Show HN & will shine in a different way.
As previously mentioned in this HN thread, we'll be opening posting to everyone to submit products for review by the community (not everything can hit the homepage or it will get too noisy with the current design) in addition to a recommendation/invite system so that the community can refer others.
The Product Hunt results for sign ups, leads, and shares are skewed. You're pointing at a completely different part of your product (mobile).
You should be pointing at the same link across all three sources before you compare the three sources. Note: fixing this does not affect the number of links clicked, of course, but it could significantly change the number of sign ups, etc.
I've submitted my site to Show HN (last week) and to Product Hunt (well you can't actually submit but I sent an email to Ryan Hoover) and haven't been able to get any clicks from either of them because the Show HN link wasn't promoted and PH haven't added us yet. TechCrunch just ignore my emails. So your mileage may vary!
For business-related products, it's also helpful to gain exposure in the industries you're in. For instance, if you're launching a product that might serve both the healthcare and legal sectors, any type of exposure there not only proves legitimacy for potential customers, but to investors as well.
We had similar numbers with Planleaf, minus TC. Except our conversion rates were quite high, but that lends itself to the product more than anything. Great job with Front App. 7 months is a long time. I think StatusPage.io waited a long time before doing their Show HN as well.
Not all posts are created equal, so it's important to note that we never hit #1 on HN to my knowledge. We were #2-4 for the majority of the day, and fell off the front page about 24 hours later. We also had a blip where we were removed before we could show our post wasn't a dupe, so we lost an hour there.
HackerNews Traffic:
HackerNews day 1: 5,750
HackerNews day 2: 1,115
HackerNews day 3: negligible
HackerNews Total: 6865
HackerNews was posted on a fairly slow Friday, so it's probably different if you post Monday morning. We had 82 total upvotes on HN.
On ProductHunt we were/are one of the top products ever, so I have no idea what it's like if you don't get a lot of upvotes. We also posted to ProductHunt on Monday morning.
ProductHunt Traffic:
ProductHunt day 1: 1,273
ProductHunt day 2: 465
ProductHunt email: 1,114 (this is rough, because I only have it as "direct" traffic, so I'm estimating what our direct traffic is on a given day and subtracting that out. But we're new enough this could be off).
ProductHunt day 3: 247
ProductHunt total: 3,126
Day 3 is today, so I don't have much data, but ProductHunt certainly has a slower drop if you're going to die. Though, again, that's probably only true if you have 150+ upvotes on ProductHunt.
But that's quantitative. Let's go qualitative.
As far as the feedback we got, HN was 10x better. Almost all of the people commenting on PH work for PH, so I assume there's a lot of dog fooding going on. It's a very young product, so it's understandable, but I can't see that growing unless there's more happening there.
Some negatives of ProductHunt are that I've had people go through and tweet at everybody who voted for us (including me) because your twitter account is publicly listed when you vote. That's kind of annoying.
Overall, why not post to PH? But it has a lot of ground to make up before it catches HN. Anecdotally, I check every single "Show HN." I've maybe clicked on two or three things on ProductHunt, mostly because I don't care enough about other people's products to seek the site out specifically.
Thanks for posting. I saw grasswire when it was posted on PH and immediately took to it; I think you're doing a great job with "visual news".
Re your question:
Overall, why not post to PH?
Because, for the most part, you can't. You have to be invited to do so, making it (near?) impossible to get on unless you know someone who knows someone who already has access.
What do you mean by "Almost all of the people commenting on PH work for PH"?
Some negatives of ProductHunt are that I've had people go through and tweet at everybody who voted for us (including me) because your twitter account is publicly listed when you vote. That's kind of annoying.
[+] [-] nothxbro|11 years ago|reply
Meaning, the product hunt results shown are the absolute best result you could hope for and most users will receive a far smaller amount of visits. PH gets a bit of hype because its invite only and people assume it has a big impact, but for most folk it would be much more impactful for their launch to even be on a smaller tech blog like Read/write or recode.
For the average person who gets on PH and gets the normal amount of upvotes (around 10-20 ) you can expect a blistering 250-500 visits. You would get more traction just posting a comment in a HN article. PH seems more powerful because its invite only and has tons of hype around it, but it does not deliver on results yet.
Surprised that HN numbers were so high, but not surprised that Techcrunch was number one. They still have a great share of the market when it comes to initial exposure.
[+] [-] minimaxir|11 years ago|reply
The app received 6100 hits with 76 HN points, so that's a good estimate.
I'm not a fan of Product Hunt because it's an echo chamber personified. It's what happened to Quora, and I don't think that strategy will work twice.
[+] [-] rrhoover|11 years ago|reply
1) Meeet http://www.producthunt.com/posts/meeet - 4,827
2) ProducTind http://www.producthunt.com/posts/productind - 4,301
3) Fatherly http://www.producthunt.com/posts/fatherly - 4,036
4) Moment http://www.producthunt.com/posts/moment-2 - 3,833
5) NEED http://www.producthunt.com/posts/need - 3,815
6) Grasswire http://www.producthunt.com/posts/grasswire - 3,802
7) HTML 5 Up http://www.producthunt.com/posts/html-5-up - 3,775
8) Machete http://www.producthunt.com/posts/machete - 3,534
9) Withings Activité http://www.producthunt.com/posts/withings-activite - 3,052
10) YIX http://www.producthunt.com/posts/yix - 3,043
Note this includes clicks in the email and on the site but doesn't account for referrals via Twitter and other WOM channels.
[+] [-] ericd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chatmasta|11 years ago|reply
The lesson is here to chillllll. Wait. Hold on. You don't need to "launch" your product as soon as v1 is deployed to Heroku. HN, product hunt, and Techcrunch will still be here in seven months. Don't waste your window of opportunity for "launching" by announcing an extremely rough, underdeveloped product. Hold out until you have customer feedback and have refined it sufficiently. Then, the leads you get will be infinitely more valuable.
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
The way Show HN has evolved over the years, the bar for it is naturally low. Show HN is for something you've made that other people can try out and talk with you about in the thread. That can be anything from a first project or weekend hack to a feedback-honed product like you've described above. The only rules are (a) you made it and (b) it works.
By "it works" I mean that it isn't a landing page or an email signup or a fundraiser, but rather something other people can play with and give feedback and ask questions about. That definitely includes new products, but also other things. Who knows what people might come up with! It just has to be interesting.
A risk with setting the bar too high is that some users will feel like contributing isn't for them. We want to avoid that. There are many talented people who maybe haven't done anything of their own yet, or haven't yet shared what they've done, or who suffer from that curse of our field, impostor syndrome. It's painfully easy to look at the polished work of others and think, "I could never do that". One reason we want Show HN to be welcoming to all levels of work is so there will be plenty of examples where people think, "I could do that". Not as in "meh, that's nothing," but in the DIY spirit of "hey, me too".
But the main reason is that many kinds of things—including seemingly trivial things—can be interesting. There's a secret relationship between the high and the low. They thrive together.
Masterful paintings are wonderful but first sketches are interesting too, especially in a workshop or a studio, which is the kind of place we want HN to be. Besides, first sketches have a way of turning into something masterful later. Most won't, but some will, and we love it when HN helps that happen.
[+] [-] rl3|11 years ago|reply
I recall seeing discussion on Product Hunt recently where founders were worried about their product being submitted without their knowledge, effectively launching them before they're ready in a beta/soft launch state.
Obviously that would be bad, but it's potentially even worse, because (as far as I know) you only get one shot at Product Hunt.
If this has actually happened or not, I'm not sure. There were a lot of founders worried about it though.
Per the discussion, I believe rrhoover said they're looking into ways to address that, and the prevailing consensus was to lock down your beta. Some other ideas were additional provisions in beta tester NDAs, and Product Hunt implementing some type of blacklist system to prevent premature submissions.
Personally I would just have a bare minimum public-facing website during beta, though it seems that this would inhibit your ability to get beta users unless you're either well connected or your product is hyped.
Of course, this same phenomenon has been happening with HN for years now, the difference being it's much more rare because HN isn't laser-focused on new products, and its submission volume is massive.
[+] [-] hayksaakian|11 years ago|reply
I think what you're getting at is suggesting that people do a soft launch or a private launch of their minimally viable product. (I agree with this).
You can't get "customer feedback" unless you have "customer(s)".
[+] [-] notastartup|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viggity|11 years ago|reply
HN: ~10K sessions, 293 requests for beta access, on a Tuesday+Wednesday
PH: ~1800 sessions, 495 requests for beta access, on a Friday+Saturday
I have a very hard time separating out HN's impact long term because of the no referrer, PH doesn't do that and from last friday to tonight (wednesday), we've gotten a total of 2,687 visitors from PH and 709 signups (yes, a 27% conversion rate). We got even more indirect signups from PH via tweets that I don't think we would have gotten otherwise.
I don't know how things would have been different if my HN post was specifically geared at telling HN about Machete and our data visualizations instead of just a sample visualization we made. Had tons of PH readers email me asking about specific features, if we were looking for funding and when they could actually get into the beta. Didn't really have that at all with HN. Although I would say that we had equal numbers of VCs from HN and PH sign up (assuming they didn't use their gmail account)
[+] [-] bobfunk|11 years ago|reply
HN forces HTTPS and your page is HTTP. The browser never sends a referrer when you follow a link from an encrypted site to an unencrypted site, so you can loose quite a bit of data in analytics by not using HTTPS since more and more inbound links will be from encrypted traffic.
Add HTTPS to www.machete.io and you'll get better data.
[+] [-] eli|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|11 years ago|reply
For instance, I've had LiberWriter on the front page a few times, and it basically does not convert, at all. Most people here can make their own eBooks without problems. Our target market are self-published authors who are not at all technical and need some help.
[+] [-] heytessa|11 years ago|reply
To be fair, I do think product hunt brings in a tiny amount of traffic.
[+] [-] rrhoover|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twocommas|11 years ago|reply
Except for the few startups that consider tech power users as their demographic, I think it's naive and counterproductive for many of them to put so much time into getting their links on these sites. If they put the same effort into getting their product in front of their actual customers they would stand to benefit much more.
[+] [-] apidoc|11 years ago|reply
HN/TC/... are good to show a new product to people that want to see new products. Thats it.
That did not mean that you get customers or a wider audience.
One year ago i launch http://apidocjs.com (OpenSource for RESTful API documentation), i show it to HN and got 2.500 Visitors in one day (yeah!), but the next days nearly zero.
Further development and step by step more users find their way to apiDoc -> organic growth.
[+] [-] tosinaf|11 years ago|reply
I'm the little guy in the story. 300 followers on twitter, only just starting to develop a name for myself.
I launched theNews ios (http://bit.ly/thenews-ios) recently which basically lets you read Hacker News & designer news in one app.
You'd think that would go down well in HN but nope, it faded into the bowels of HN & im not surprised. There is so much content due to how "open" it is.
Meanwhile people auctually took notice of my app on PH & DN because u dont't entirely need points to be relevant due to the moderate number of submissions. Frankly a better system for the little guy.
Show HN has its place for hacks & product launches while PH is like a brilliant way to launch your product & get feedback from amazing people that you look up to
& i don't think PH is tryna be like Show HN, it's doing its own thing. giving its own spin on Show HN.
All communities can't be open & frnakly the number of products on PH is already overwhelming at its current amount & with more its only gonna get more where it just becomes impossible to keep up. Thats probably the biggest challenge PH faces.
it's a nice alternative to Show HN & will shine in a different way.
[+] [-] api|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrhoover|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggiaco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aagha|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] return0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaph|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] propelledjeans|11 years ago|reply
You should be pointing at the same link across all three sources before you compare the three sources. Note: fixing this does not affect the number of links clicked, of course, but it could significantly change the number of sign ups, etc.
[+] [-] sparkzilla|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielhonigman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajiang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramoq|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arfliw|11 years ago|reply
Most people struggle to get even get one of those. The trifecta is quit impressive.
[+] [-] austenallred|11 years ago|reply
Not all posts are created equal, so it's important to note that we never hit #1 on HN to my knowledge. We were #2-4 for the majority of the day, and fell off the front page about 24 hours later. We also had a blip where we were removed before we could show our post wasn't a dupe, so we lost an hour there.
HackerNews Traffic:
HackerNews day 1: 5,750
HackerNews day 2: 1,115
HackerNews day 3: negligible
HackerNews Total: 6865
HackerNews was posted on a fairly slow Friday, so it's probably different if you post Monday morning. We had 82 total upvotes on HN.
On ProductHunt we were/are one of the top products ever, so I have no idea what it's like if you don't get a lot of upvotes. We also posted to ProductHunt on Monday morning.
ProductHunt Traffic:
ProductHunt day 1: 1,273
ProductHunt day 2: 465
ProductHunt email: 1,114 (this is rough, because I only have it as "direct" traffic, so I'm estimating what our direct traffic is on a given day and subtracting that out. But we're new enough this could be off).
ProductHunt day 3: 247
ProductHunt total: 3,126
Day 3 is today, so I don't have much data, but ProductHunt certainly has a slower drop if you're going to die. Though, again, that's probably only true if you have 150+ upvotes on ProductHunt.
But that's quantitative. Let's go qualitative.
As far as the feedback we got, HN was 10x better. Almost all of the people commenting on PH work for PH, so I assume there's a lot of dog fooding going on. It's a very young product, so it's understandable, but I can't see that growing unless there's more happening there.
Some negatives of ProductHunt are that I've had people go through and tweet at everybody who voted for us (including me) because your twitter account is publicly listed when you vote. That's kind of annoying.
Overall, why not post to PH? But it has a lot of ground to make up before it catches HN. Anecdotally, I check every single "Show HN." I've maybe clicked on two or three things on ProductHunt, mostly because I don't care enough about other people's products to seek the site out specifically.
[+] [-] aagha|11 years ago|reply
Re your question:
Overall, why not post to PH?
Because, for the most part, you can't. You have to be invited to do so, making it (near?) impossible to get on unless you know someone who knows someone who already has access.
What do you mean by "Almost all of the people commenting on PH work for PH"?
[+] [-] minimaxir|11 years ago|reply
Wait, what? Is that expected behavior for PH?
[+] [-] hexleo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shahocean|11 years ago|reply