Today I will tell you how to prepare a startup for a Product Hunt entry, what steps should be taken before that, and how to stir up interest in the project on the day and after the publication.
Introduction
For the last couple of years I have been living in the USA and doing on English-speaking (and not only) resources. Today I will tell
Today I will share my experience of attracting international users for IT startups with minimal investment. This is mainly what content marketing tools are for. Many of them are free or almost free, but can bring good results.
So, this is where you should promote your startup if you want to attract international users.
The Hacker News resource has long become one of the most popular technology and startups in the niche. If a project manages to get to its main page for at least a couple of tens of minutes, this can already lead to a surge in traffic - you can easily get several hundred clicks to the site.
This resource has a Show HN section - here project creators or ordinary users can share useful links. It’s worth starting promotion from this resource - it’s free, and if successful, you can get a good result. Most likely, you will not be able to get to the main page, and the audience on HN is not always very friendly, but a link to the site from a reputable resource in any case will not be superfluous.
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Two resources that work on a similar model. These are directories with descriptions of startups. For a fee, the description of the project gets into the listing bypassing the general queue (which moves slowly), can be pinned to the main page, and these services also include a link to the project in their mailing lists.
Betapage's pricing for the last time I used it was:
- One day on the front page: $28
- Two days: $48
- Three days: $68
- Four days: $88
Inclusion in the mailing list costs another $30, so this figure should be added to the final price. Our experience of using a paid listing on this site cannot be called successful - one day on the main page plus a mailing list did not give us even hundreds of registered users.
The cost of posting on Betalist is higher - $129, but there is also the possibility of free publication. In the latter case, you will have to wait about a month for placement, but if you want to save money, this is quite an option. In the most recent project, we opted for this option and received a total of 452 users, with a spike on the day of the announcement.
In general, the main costs fell on Betapage and Betalist, and in our case they were at least partially justified only in the second case.
International Content Marketing
Since we planned to attract not only users from English-speaking countries, we decided to experiment in this direction as well. We already had some good articles in English, as well as descriptions on Betalist and Product Hunt.
With the help of Upwork, we found Spanish-speaking editors who not only helped us with the translation, but also advised us on where and how to share links to published materials. I must say that the cost of translating one blog post from English into Spanish usually does not exceed $10.
As a result, for the "sowing" of content, we selected two main resources:
- is a popular aggregator site in Latin America, somewhat similar to Reddit, with over 21 million visitors.
- – 9.5 million visitors.
In addition, on our own, we have selected a number of sections on Reddit where residents of the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America communicate:
- - a section dedicated to learning English;
- — general thematic Spanish-language subreddit, 14,3 thousand users;
- – 92 thousand subscribers;
- - section of Venezuela, 34,5 thousand subscribers;
- — 13,8 thousand subscribers;
- - 48 thousand users.
The result exceeded all our wildest expectations - we not only received registrations and comments on Reddit, likes on Meneame, but the project was noticed by Latin American journalists and bloggers. In particular, after a review on the popular Argentinean IT resource wwhat's new, several thousand people visited us in a couple of days.
But the most important event was, of course, the placement on Product Hunt.
Product hunt: launch guide
There are a lot of guides and stories on the net about how best to launch on Product Hunt, so I will not write very much, I will focus only on the main points.
First of all, you should read from the PH team itself. Here are the three main theses of the document:
- You can not look for a hunter who will post the product. Now it makes less sense - previously, the subscribers of a popular user were sent email notifications about the products he published, now this is not the case.
- You can link directly to a product post instead of the PH home page. Urban legend has it that PH penalizes projects that are voted on by users who go to the direct URL rather than finding it through the home page. It is not true.
- You can't ask for likes - that's what you get fined for. Therefore, all communications dedicated to the launch should contain a clear message: “We have published on PH, here is the link, come in, comment, ask questions!”
These are the points that many do not know about until now. There are a few more points that are important to highlight.
- Hunter is better to find. This is more of an image moment, if this person posts a link to your PH post on their social networks, it will be a plus. But if such a character is not looked for for a long time, then you can do without.
- Running on PH is a 24 hour job. The countdown of the new day starts at 00:00 US West Coast time. You must be online 24 hours to respond to comments in a timely manner.
- After 24 hours also need to work. Getting into the list of top products of the day gives a bonus - you are also mentioned in the mailing list, but if this was not successful, then there are other ways to further use PH. For example, the site has the ability to ask questions, the answers to which may be recommendations of a particular software. If you get into such a selection, you will get more traffic.
As a result, we did not get into the list of top 5 projects, but users voted for us for at least another week - this allowed us to stay on the main one, since about 10-15 products are displayed on it every day. The more days passed since our launch, the further you had to scroll to find the product, but this did not interfere with the transition to the site.
The main secret of such a long-term placement is that you must maintain interest in it. This means preparing and periodically publishing articles with a link to your listing, doing mailing lists, etc.
Example: A project blog post that calls to go to a product page on PH and has a built-in badge with a like counter.
Conclusion
The activities described in the material cost us about $200, and it took a couple of weeks to prepare and implement them. As a result, we received thousands of clicks to the site and hundreds of registrations. You can copy these techniques for your startups, I'm sure it will help you get the first international users.
If you have any questions - write, I will be happy to answer.
Source: habr.com