Casa Media - vidjet-product-hunt

How did you approach the launch on Product Hunt? What was the game plan?

We thought that a good product would speak for itself on Product Hunt. We were relying too much on this “organic” aspect of the PH algorithm. 

We didn’t have a game plan at first but, 3 months before our launch, a friend of mine told me that finding a good hunter would help to kick-start our launch. 

In my searches for hunters, I went through many pieces of content geared towards preparing a Product Hunt campaign. I soon realized how important it was to have a clear plan for your campaign so you can rank high, gain users, build awareness, and grow.

To look for hunters I simply made a list of 10 hunters that had each made at least 200 hunts. In reaching out to them, almost all got back to me. They usually send a form for you to easily input your PH listing elements. This could include your tagline, description, pictures, etc. I ended up making a final decision on Chris Messina, with 2700+ products hunted.

From this moment, I had a precise launch date at D+30. From there I spent 2 hours/day throughout the entire month to prepare the following elements: 

• 6 pictures for the Product Hunt listing
• A recorded + edited presentation video for the listing
• Prepared a tagline, description, and first comment for the listing
• Made  a GIF logo for  the PH listing
• Prepared an assortment of blurbs/texts to post on groups and communities
• Prepared a list of at least 5 Slack communities
• Prepared a list of at least 5 Discord communities
• Prepared a list of at least 10 Facebook Groups
• Made a WhatsApp group with 15 active Product Hunt members

You Ranked 1st of the day in terms of comments. What was the strategy to generate interactions?

We really focused on inviting people that would give us feedback on this innovative video concept. Of course, an innovative product helps as people are more likely to give their thoughts and comments on it.

We have asked for feedback on our presentation video (you can check it out here), in the PH listing description. For the messages we posted on various social media platforms so they could be viewed almost everywhere!  

We also made people understand that we would interact with them about their feedback. I was personally in charge of answering every comment and did so as fast as I could. This also encouraged people to interact more with the PH listings we shared.

We’d love to get some feedback, and I’m happy to answer any questions! ?

You can write to Baptiste at baptiste@vidjet.io

How much did you spend in marketing to have a successful Product Hunt campaign?

$0.00  literally. 

However, I did spend about 50 hours preparing the pre-launch stage, 15 hours on launch day, and an extra 10 hours were spent post-launch.

What was your Inbound Marketing approach?

After having found and gotten accepted into 20+ communities on Slack, Facebook, and Discord  I prepared a 25-second video to announce our launch personally. On launch day I posted this video, along with a text (see above) through these channels. 

D-Day, finally! ?
Vidjet is featured today on Product Hunt!
? It’s the easiest and fastest way to publish videos on a website!
Videos have a popup format, so you can segment and trigger them to your
visitors.
➡️ You can find it right here.
We’d love to have your support & feedback ❤️
PS: We have a FREE plan including all features!
Thanks!

Pro tip: Countries and different time zones

It’s important to post on these communities according to the audience’s geographic areas.

We started with European-based communities by publishing at 9:00 AM, local time. We then went on to post on American-based communities later in the day. 

Actionable content: List of PH communities

• FB Group: Product Hunt France
• FB Group: Product Hunt Europe
• FB Group: ProductHunt en Español
• FB Group: Product Hunt London
• FB Group: Product Hunt Exchange Community
• FB Group: French Startups
• FB Group: Startup Mumbai
• FB Group: Product Hunt India
• FB Group: Product Hunt Poland
• FB Group: London Startups
• FB Group: Product Hunt Nordics
• FB Group: Product Hunt Germany
• FB Group: Product Hunt Berlin
• FB Group: Product Hunt
• FB Group: Product Hunt Isarel
• FB Group: Startup Product Launches
• FB Group: Product Hunt Miami
• LinkedIn Group: PH Community
• Slack – Growth Marketers
• Slack – Startup BCN
• Slack – Ecom Nation
• Slack – PLG
• Slack – TechMasters
• Slack – MindtheProduct
• Slack – eCommTalk
• Discord Servers

Did you do cold outreach/outbound specifically for the Product Hunt launch?

It’s important to engage with other makers’ posts within these communities. From there you’ll find a lot of makers who have already previously gone through Product Hunt launches. These people already know how important it is to succeed on PH and are usually keen to help you with up-votes, comments, and reviews on your PH listings. Find them, contact them (comment their post or DM them), and ask for their support and feedback. 
It is pretty manual and time-consuming, but you’ll get upvotes for sure!

Replying to people’s comments with different accounts

These communities’ various platforms on Facebook, Slack, and Discord can easily track spamming and repetitive messaging. Once you have reached your messaging limit, you won’t be able to post for the rest of the day. This is why having a friend, colleague, or just a second account can be very useful. That way you can reply to people’s posts throughout the whole day.

What other strategies have proved to be a big win for you?

We’re pretty satisfied with the number of active users we have acquired and interacted with throughout the post-launch period.

With it being a relatively new product, we needed as much feedback as possible from actual users. Over these 36 active users, we have had a direct interaction with 20 of them and have collected their individual thoughts about Vidjet. This helped us to prioritize our roadmap features and accelerate its development.

What could you have done better?

Launch Date

We launched on Wednesday, which is a very competitive day.

Tuesday and Wednesday are the days with the most traffic on Product Hunt. This means you can  potentially have a big exposure, but the competition will be intense.

These days are good for established companies, or founders who all have a big network. They can actually generate crazy upvotes blasts, all of a sudden, by activating their community.

Being relatively small, the sweet spot for us would have been on a Friday. There is a little less traffic as well as significantly less competition. This way it would have been much easier to rank on the top 3 listings. 

Create a Community Beforehand 

We did prepare a WhatsApp group with the 15 active PH members ahead of time. This gave Vidjet an initial boost and awareness at the beginning of the launch. However, we should have spent more time engaging with PH makers, recruiting them, and having them already activated them on D-Day.

Launching on PH is like a war game: you’re safe as long as you have bullets. When you’re running out of them, you can no longer trigger a shot, but your enemies are still firing. 

If I had to do it all over again, I would spend more time during the pre-launch stage to build 2 communities with at least 50 people in both of them. One would focus solely on Europe where the other would focus on North America. That way we would be able to activate them during their own time zones instead of doing it twice over – Europe first, North America after.

This would have given us more bullets to shoot throughout the launch day. 

Thanks for reading everyone! You can download our PDF containing actionable tips to a successful Product Hunt launch below! ?