Show HN vs. TechCrunch vs. Product Hunt: what's most effective to launch a product

189 pointsby mathoucalmost 11 years ago

23 comments

nothxbroalmost 11 years ago

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.

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chatmastaalmost 11 years ago

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.

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viggityalmost 11 years ago

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+WednesdayPH: ~1800 sessions, 495 requests for beta access, on a Friday+SaturdayI 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)

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elialmost 11 years ago

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.

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heytessaalmost 11 years ago

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.

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twocommasalmost 11 years ago

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.

apidocalmost 11 years ago

It depend on what you want.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 <a href="http://apidocjs.com" rel="nofollow">http://apidocjs.com</a> (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.

tosinafalmost 11 years ago

Just like to add my two cents.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 (<a href="http://bit.ly/thenews-ios" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/thenews-ios</a>) 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.

apialmost 11 years ago

It seems Product Hunt is closed to most submitters... how did you post there? Did you score an invite?

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return0almost 11 years ago

Fun, but how many products have actually "made it" from such "launches"? I think you get a small bump from "da geeks" and that's all.

yaphalmost 11 years ago

A "statistical analysis" with one sample product is certainly enough to tell you what platform is most effective to launch it. /s

propelledjeansalmost 11 years ago

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.

sparkzillaalmost 11 years ago

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!

danielhonigmanalmost 11 years ago

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.

ajiangalmost 11 years ago

Really cool to see how far Product Hunt has come, rivaling TC on visit traffic and HN on signups /leads

ramoqalmost 11 years ago

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.

arfliwalmost 11 years ago

Next please teach us how to launch and make TC, the front page of HN and the top of PH.Most people struggle to get even get one of those. The trifecta is quit impressive.

austenallredalmost 11 years ago

Our product (<a href="http://grasswire.com" rel="nofollow">http://grasswire.com</a>) was recently also on the top of HackerNews and ProductHunt (Show HN:<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7954327" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7954327</a> , ProductHunt: <a href="http://www.producthunt.com/posts/grasswire" rel="nofollow">http://www.producthunt.com/posts/grasswire</a>). No TechCrunch writeup yet.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: 5,750HackerNews day 2: 1,115HackerNews day 3: negligibleHackerNews Total: 6865HackerNews 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: 1,273ProductHunt day 2: 465ProductHunt 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: 247ProductHunt total: 3,126Day 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.

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hexleoalmost 11 years ago

More people visited is not sure bring good effect. It influence by other factors. So complicated.

shahoceanalmost 11 years ago

Its about how big the STORY you make!

gearoidocalmost 11 years ago

Betalist.

norenjralmost 11 years ago

Build a good product.

dangalmost 11 years ago

We changed the url from <a href="http://fr.slideshare.net/Frontapp/hn-vs-tc-vs-ph" rel="nofollow">http://fr.slideshare.net/Frontapp/hn-vs-tc-vs-ph</a>.