How we hacked Product Hunt & acquired paid users
Product hunt is a website that lets user share and discover new products. It was founded by Ryan Hoover in November 2013 and was accepted into prestigious Y Combinator summer 2014 batch.
It was later acquired by AngelList for a sum of 20 million USD.
For any entrepreneur its a dream to launch their creation on Product Hunt and watch how the community reacts to their creation. Community members can up-vote if they like it, share their feedback and advice.
Its a milestone for a startup to launch their product on Product Hunt and if the startup is lucky, they may be up-voted to be the best product of the day or year depending on how many up-votes the community members give to the startup.
I am big fan of the community and the interactions that happen on Product Hunt.
Our startup is based out of India and we were thinking of launching our product in private beta in United States & United Kingdom regions.
Because of the time difference and literally zero contacts in these regions we were really confused as to how we launch and acquire initial test users for our product.
So, I decided to explore what Product Hunt can do for us.
I went ahead and explored the products that were getting launched daily and the feedback and interactions that were happening over there.
The hacking phase…
This is where things gets exciting.
Airbnb founder Brian Chesky in his podcast, Masters of Scale mentioned that how they growth hacked their way and acquired users ONE-BY-ONE.
This is not about how we hacked Product Hunt servers and finding our ways to get emails of all Product Hunt users.
This is about how we hacked the community in our favor, by participating in interactions without even mentioning our product anywhere and driving users to our product one by one.
In order to give you more context about how we did it, here is what our product do.
Its a B2B sales intelligence platform that track companies that are growing fast and have money to invest.
We track companies that are hiring for specific roles, those who have recently raised funds & those who are launching new products or services.
Now, this becomes the premise of our interactions and the value add we give to users in Product hunt community.
Have a look at my first feedback that I gave to CanvasFlip
If you notice I have nowhere mentioned that I have a startup that is into B2B sales prospecting space or the name of the company.
My only intention was to give first, give advice and help the community members.
If someone likes your advice and you are not thinking of selling and really caring about their success you will find lot of people start asking you for more advice, which can lead to a user acquisition later on.
Now, this is what I got back in return from Vipul Mishra (CanvasFlip), founder of CanvasFlip.
Boom, that’s how we acquired the first user from Product Hunt.
While I am writing this I am still in talks with the team for starting a pilot with them, but there are many who have already started their pilots and converted into paid users.
Another one……
Bottom line is, my focus was always on giving advice and helping them first in the areas where I can add value and I know more about.
If you add value to someone and provide them good resources without being pushy and selling your stuff, you will have people asking you for more advice on what you do and how you can help.
In-fact, someone noticed this and reached out to me over email asking how I am acquiring users from Product Hunt (which lead me to write this post).
In my response, I mentioned that the interactions should not be done with a motive to acquire users & it should only focus on adding value and once you do, people will start interacting with you.
Now we have initial paying clients in both United States and United Kingdom, all thanks to Product Hunt and the community it has.
I loved Product Hunt so much that I felt the need to have a messenger in Product Hunt so that people can interact instantly and conversations can be done over there.
So I sent this as a feedback to Ryan Hoover and he was really kind to reply back :)
Start adding value to the community specially to communities like Product Hunt, if you add value genuinely people will respect you for that and help you further.
If you have any thoughts further or you would like to share your experiences further then do comment :)
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