On July 4, 2014, Power 20 was featured on Product Hunt, a site for the tech community dedicated to discovering new and worthy tech products. We made it into the coveted top 10, hovering at around #2 for much of the day. The Product Hunt community is small but highly engaged and likely quite influential. cialis pilules
Last year one of my post about using a standing desk for 2 years was ranked #1 on HackerNews for about 10 hours, leading to a huge bump in traffic and real money being made. That landed me on Huffington Post and Fox News and brought well over 100k users to my blog. I detailed that experience here.
Product Hunt is a much, much smaller community.
And that is intentional. While anyone that signs in can vote, those who are given access to comment are either founders themselves (when their product is posted) or are referred through someone in the community with invites. This means commenters are tech-industry insiders or current CEOs. Power 20 was upvoted 44 times. Nine of those were from friends and one was from myself.
That community is engaged.
Despite having far fewer contributors, the Product Hunt community is very, very engaged. As you can see from the graph above, my traffic on the Power 20 website didn’t soar to astounding heights. Most of my sales come from discovery on the app store and from inside the app, so that’s ok with me, but in this case, after one week on Product Hunt, revenues increased by 59% compared to the previous week. Product Hunt users are engaged and are willing to spend on products recommended there.
Beyond just buying the app, they also explored my site. The average time on my site from Product Hunt visitors was 1:28 and the bounce rate was 50.64%.
Here are the actual daily visits from Product Hunt to Power 20:
- July 4 (first featured): 574
- July 5: 415
- July 6: 230
- July 7: 218
- July 8: 102
- July 9: 41
The community is influential.
Most people who upvoted my app were tech company CEOs. There were just a few commenters, but they included Trevor Owens, James Pember, and Brad Feld. These gentlemen have a combined Twitter following of over 200,000.