💡Lessons learned from launching a Saas tool on Product Hunt 🚀

Marie Outtier
4 min readAug 13, 2019

Last month, we launched Aiden.ai — our AI platform for marketing teams of all sizes — on Product Hunt. Our goal was to raise product awareness and to get more users on our platform. More importantly, our launch led to a considerable increase in inbound interest.

Here are our results, what we learned, why we’re thankful to the community, and why the Product Hunt team is awesome.

Our PH launch in numbers

Product Hunt page: Our launch racked up almost 340+ upvotes and 65+ comments on the day, and helped us jump from a handful of to 100+ free trial sign-ups over a span of one week. Since then, our number of upvotes has grown to 450 (at the time of writing). We were listed as the #5 product for the day and obtained the 3rd highest number of upvotes!

Fun fact: @ryanhoover, the founder of Product Hunt, also upvoted our product!

After launching at 00:01 PST, we were the #1 product for the day and remained in that position until just after midday.

We eventually dropped to #3 as several other new products launched throughout the day, and to #5 in the last few minutes before midnight.

Website Traffic: On launch day we had 2,075 website visits, owing mainly to Product Hunt. Since then we’ve had 9000+ users visit our website and racked up over 11,000+ sessions.

Here’s a Google Analytics chart detailing the number of visitors to our website both before and after our launch. Care to venture a guess as to when we launched on Product Hunt ? 😎

Perhaps most excitingly, we managed to reach people from across the globe. Besides users from the two countries in which we are based i.e., United Kingdom and United States, we also received sign-up requests from users in countries such as France, Colombia, Nigeria, India, Peru, Turkey, Brazil, the Netherlands and China!

Qualitative results

Overall feedback from the community was really positive and engaging! People were receptive, engaged and involved, both on Twitter and in the comments on Product Hunt.

Using our Twitter account, where we have over 1000 followers, we actively tweeted about our product throughout launch day. Product Hunt originally required users to sign-up with their Twitter accounts so the community is typically quite active there.

After reaching (and eventually exceeding) 100 upvotes, Product Hunt tweeted out in support of our achieving this milestone.

From AI specialists to Growth managers at Drift, Segment,Instagram, and former CMO of Spotify the community’s response to our product has been heartwarming. Here are a few of the tweets that made the team feel warm and fuzzy inside 😊 :

And some wonderful comments from the tech community in general:

A week later, we were privileged to be featured by Product Hunt’s editorial team, and got a special mention in the Product Hunt newsletter (thanks Taylor Majewski), which gave us an extra boost in sign-ups:

The team worked incredibly hard to prepare for the launch. Everything from deciding when to launch (we ultimately decided to launch on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday), to being on-call for 24 hours in both our London and SF offices. It was quite stressful on the day, and it will be for you too, but it’s all worth it!

Lessons we learned:

  • Launch at midnight PST, benefit from the early traction of Europe and then engage with your US community to continue building momentum until 11.59pm PST
  • Tell your clients, investors, prospects and communities that you will be launching at least 3 days before. On the day, ask for feedback (not “upvotes” ;))
  • Don’t just contact 100% happy clients about your upcoming launch, tell everyone. It will give you an opportunity to respond to their concerns publicly and show them that you are genuinely looking for feedback, not (just) praises.
  • It’s not over until it’s midnight the next day. Be reactive, reply to every comment swiftly, it matters a lot!

Aiden.ai Results —

  • 450 Upvotes
  • 34 Reviews
  • 2000+ visitors on the landing page
  • 100+ sign-ups to the product

Hoping this is helpful, and we’re wishing you very successful launches on Product Hunt!

If you enjoyed this article, do us a solid and give us some feedback on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/aiden-ai-ai-marketing-analyst and if you want to learn more about Aiden.ai, visit https://www.aiden.ai/.

Thanks!

--

--

Marie Outtier

Franco-British entrepreneur. Co-founder & CEO @aiden.ai (Acq by @Twitter). Investor.