I launched SCRAPE email hunter this week and made it to the front page of ProductHunt. This post will be about the steps I took to make that happen and the result of being on the front page!

The Launch

Launching the campaign was pretty straight-forward. I had just wrapped up SCRAPE a week earlier and put up a super simple landing page. Unlike when I launched AppDoctor on ProductHunt SCRAPE was straight-forward and easy to understand. I attribute that partially to the success of the campaign.

I had some friends and family upvote my campaign along with posting about the campaign in ~10 subreddits and a couple of other places around the internet.

The result of this tiny push was around 80 upvotes and 10 comments. In comparison to the other things posted that day I was doing really well, so well in fact that they decided to feature my posted the next day!

Front Page Launch

Once I noticed the tag showing I would be on the front page the next day I was ecstatic. My campaign had been paused from receiving upvotes or comments until the following morning. I spend a couple of minutes that night to add google analytics to the landing page. Don't ask me why I didn't do this earlier because I wouldn't have an answer.

I woke up around 9 am and checked ProductHunt. While I was indeed on the front-page, unfortunately, I was "below the fold", behind the "Show x More" button.

Even being below the fold I had already received around 150 website views. I ended the day with around 450.

While this is lower then I expected I also was not taken into account being "below the fold"

I have received 193 upvotes at the time of writing this.

Let's Talk Money

I launched SCRAPE with a week free trial so I won't know until sometime next week how many people liked SCRAPE enough to pay the $5/mo for it.

I did feel like the idea was validated at this point especially following some comments like the following:

While I originally made SCRAPE for a use-case I had I was happy at this point that other people saw the value compared to the other solutions on the market and the VERY different approach SCRAPE takes. As with any successful product/service you need people that like it enough to go to bat and recommend it to others.

Random Thoughts

Some things were interesting to me about the whole experience:

  • A lot of the traffic came from sites that showed producthunts frontpage. I checked a couple of these sites and they did not have a concept of "show x more" so I was grouped in with everyone else and I believe this helped.
  • I continued to get traffic after the front-page feature was over. I think this is an overrated aspect of being featured. By being featured your now searchable on producthunt(go ahead and search scrape :D).
  • The producthunt metric is upvotes, not reviews or comments. It seemed most people were much more likely to upvote then review or comment.
  • I think SCRAPE being simple, having 1 goal and doing it well was a huge upside in running the campaign. I didn't have to explain what it does or how like I have had to 1000x before with AppDoctor

I will post a followup blog post in a couple of weeks so you can get a larger picture of what ProductHunt can do for you.

Till next time. ✌️