Reaching the Top of Product Hunt with Derrick Reimer MicroConf Remote 2021

0:00(gentle music) (upbeat music) - My friend, Derrick Reimer, co-founder of Drip, founder of SavvyCal and savvycal.com, he's gonna be talking next and he's gonna be diving into his Product Hunt launch. He has prepared some slides for us with intricate detailed numbers and I'm really looking forward to it. And it's, we're gonna have a little conversation, don't be surprised if I interrupt him now and again with some questions and if you have questions, we will be answering them, he's gonna talk for about 15 or 20 minutes and then we're gonna have five to 10 minutes of Q&A at the end, if you wanna find out, if you have anything that you feel

0:43like wasn't covered in the talk. So with that, let's give a warm MicroConf Remote welcome to Mr. Derrik Reimer. How's it going sir? - Hello! Thanks for having me. - Absolutely. It's great to, you've been on the MicroConf stage with me, you've been on Startups for the Rest of Us, MicroConf on Air, and I feel like you're, rounding the bases,

1:03you got that, what's it called? Hitting the cycle where you hit a first, second, wait, a single? Basketball is not my sport, but... - Don't ask ask me, for a baseball reference. (laughs) Single, double, triple (muffled speaking) Yeah, it's great to have you on here, man. So, if (muffled speaking) Aaron, if you can pull up Derrick's slides,

1:21Derrick you have your slide advancer already? - I do, I think it'll work. - Awesome. - Let's see. - Cool. So I'm gonna let you- - All right. - Yeah I'll let you take it from here. And obviously I'll interject, as I said as I have questions. - Sounds good. Feel free. So yeah, I'm excited to be here.

1:36Thanks everyone for coming out. And, I'm excited to be talking to you about kind of our journey with SavvyCal to reaching kind of the top of Product Hunt, this last January and some of the lessons we learned from that whole process and how we thought about kind of orchestrating the launch, the timing of it,

1:54and so on. So, excited to be here, talking to you about this. Just real quick, a little bit about me, we touched on most of this already but, I'm a full-stack product creator, I've been kinda doing the bootstrapped SaaS thing for about 10 years now, co-founded Drip alongside the one and only Rob Walling

2:12and now I'm working on SavvyCal. And, you can hear me weekly on "The Art of Product Podcast" where Ben and I kind of talk about what's happened in the last week in our businesses and kind of working in public, and, I think I've been to every single US-based MicroConf except for the first one. So, always love interacting with folks at MicroConf and can't wait to see you all in person

2:35when in-person events are a thing again. - For the record, I think you were like 12 years old when the first MicroConf happened, now we're live on this. - That's not too far off, I think I was fresh out of college and very fresh in many ways. (laughs) All right. So, we'll kick this off with kind of just talking through some numbers from the SavvyCal launch and then we'll kinda into some

3:00of the details about how we got there. So, January 7th, the product went live and in the time since then we've accumulated close to 2000 upvotes, about 256 comments on the common thread. We got number one product of the week and number two for the month of January. And this ended up driving about 10,000 unique visitors to the site, around 3000 registrations for the product,

3:29and that's free signups without a credit card. And then, a certain percentage of those have converted into trial and then customer, and that has resulted in about a $4,000 bump in MRR. And so suffice to say, I was extremely blown away by this. I mean, first of all, you never know what to expect with a launch like this, it's where a website

3:53that's effectively a popularity contest of sorts. Obviously there are things you can do to help increase your chances for success but definitely didn't expect this. And so, just goes to show how you gotta kind of take on some of these things and not everyone's going to work out, but some of them might. And so, gotta put some gas in the Serendipity Engine

4:16and see what you can make happen. - Yeah, I think there is a lot of probably warranted skepticism around the Hacker News or the Product Hunt launch, because of the fact that it's, I like to do repeatable things at work every time or most times, and these don't, however, they're repeatable enough, 'cause if you get one out of 10, two out of 10, like this is, I mean 4,000 MRR for a lot of folks, I mean, frankly if you're living anywhere that's not that expensive,

4:47that can be Rom of Profitability ++ right away. So, I'm a super excited to hear more about it. - Yeah, totally. And I mean, along those lines, like this is the big caveat anytime I talk to anyone about Product Hunt, so much of what happens on there is beyond your control, so you never know, who else is happening to launch that day and going to kind of take most of the attention,

5:15maybe your product doesn't end up resonating totally with the Product Hunt audience and that doesn't necessarily mean that you're not building the right thing, it just means maybe it's not a great fit for the audience or, maybe it's a little too niche and that niche just doesn't really have a presence there. So there's a lot of things, kind of what you alluded to Rob in your opening, so many different variables

5:38and Product Hunt is no different. And so, it's important to manage your expectations and think of this as just one kind of marketing experiment and it may have great results may not, but still a worthwhile thing to do. - Yeah. And to give folks an idea, I have personally posted 14 projects to Product Hunt,

5:59I'm just looking at my dashboard right now. And one of the lowest upvotes, let's see, "TinySeed" when we launched got 11 upvotes, "Start Small Stay Small" got 19 upvotes, that was years later after it was published. But I think what are the highest upvotes are? Looks like I posted "Startups for the Rest of Us"

6:18within the last couple of years and that got about 430. And then when we launched 'The Video Vault" we got 330. So, I know you've got way more than that but that gives you an idea like of 14, even for someone with reach like myself, I think it looks like about a 30% success rate, that I, that got in the triple digits of upvotes

6:37and probably drove substantial traffic for us. - Yeah. And I should say, like, I've done a couple, not that many launches but a couple other products, "Codetree" was the other main one that I did back in I think it was 2015, 2016. And that one, if I recall it got like 130 upvotes and it felt, I mean, it was for the scale of the community at the time, and, the scope of the project, it felt like a a good success, but it was also felt a little bit like different times back then where other people would hunt other people's products more

7:13and it was kind of this is more organic thing. And now, I mean like most of these types of platforms it is become much more curated, I guess. And like there's people put a lot more attention generally into carefully orchestrating their launches, which is not a bad thing and that's what we're here to talk about today. But yeah, it is interesting how the platform has evolved, pretty much over the last 10 years,

7:39I think it's been around, so... - Yeah, quite a while. I do wanna pop in with one question, I think if a bunch come through I won't keep derailing you, but I think it's warranted to ask now because you just talked about that MRR, that $4,000 MRR bump. The question is from Justin Kistner, Justin Kistner

7:58in the MicroComf Remote Channel of our Connect Slack. And he says, how long did the MRR continue to flow in after the launch, are you still getting customers from it? - Yeah, there's definitely been an effect of, so we got obviously a big bump the day of, and then I'll kinda touch on this a little bit later in the talk, but like an even bigger bump

8:23when I got mentioned in the newsletter. And so the bulk of the traffic came in that time and it sort of gradually tapered off over time, but we sustained close to 100 trials in the Pipeline for a couple of weeks after that, and most of those were kind of driven from Product Hunt. So there definitely is kind of a reverberating effect, and it has gradually kind of tapered down

8:45and of course the attribution's really hard. So it's hard to know, whether it's now a result of Product Hunt or just sort of like, other people who've heard about product and are starting to use it and spreading it. It's kind of a tricky story to pick apart but I think, yes, definitely like we've had kind of continued growth off of the momentum

9:08from Product Hunt the last couple of months. - Awesome. Let's keep running. - Yeah. So, kind of a just a loose road up what we're going to talk about, first, thinking about like timing, when to actually put your product on Product Hunt, some things you can do to build a little bit of momentum leading up to it, what you're gonna think about in crafting your post and some of the bits of data you're gonna want to have there, what to expect on launch day and then some things you can do post-launch

9:35to kind of, to leverage any momentum you've built there.

9:42All right. So yeah, first of all, timing. So I think a mistake that a lot of products make is putting your product up on Product Hunt a little bit too early, because there's some things you wanna have in place ahead of that to really give yourself the best chance for success. So, if you're a brand new product and you haven't launched yet to the world, hopefully you're building a pre-launch email list and that's important for many reasons but in this context, that's a list that you will want to definitely reach out to ahead of your launch and on your launch day to say, hey, people are discussing our product

10:20and come share your thoughts about it and show your support. And so that's an asset you'll wanna have. You'll wanna have real customers using the product. So, we thought it was SavvyCal, we thought about it as like, let some early access customers in the summertime, couple months later do a gradual launch to opening up public access in September

10:43and then we decided to put it on Product Hunt in January. So we kind of spaced it out over four to six months. And, by the time we landed on Product Hunt, we had a nice solid base of customers who were, had become fans of the product and were very happy to come and drop reviews on there and really genuinely say nice things, not just your friends who will say nice things about your product as a favor but real customers,

11:12and that's an important thing to have. And then the third thing is doing some work on your positioning. This is always a work in progress for any company really but I think you can really do yourself a service if you have a clear statement about who the product is for, who's gonna really care about why they should care, shout out to April Dunford's book, "Obviously Awesome" she has a great framework in there for kind of mapping out different customer segments that could be using your product and ways to craft

11:50your positioning and messaging around that. And if you have a really clear story there then it has a better chance of resonating with people. Otherwise things can get a little bit mired in the common threads, I've seen this happen before where people are confused or how is this different than major competitor X? And for us, that was because SavvyCal's

12:11in a competitive market, that was a big thing. We made sure to have competitor-comparison pages ready to go, so if those questions came up, we could just share it and kind of have a once and for all answer. And, so once you have those things then it's a good time to think about posting on Product Hunt. - I have a question on this slide from Tony from a CloudForecast, he says how big was your customer base that helped you launch

12:35on Product Hunt? So, I'm guessing how many paid and or free users did you have at that time and then how big was your pre-launch email list? - Yeah, so I think the pre-launch email list was around 1000 people, and I believe I had, I should have this number written down but I think it was around 200 customers using the product. So a couple thousand in MRR and about 1000 people on the pre-launch list, and so I had already marketed to that list obviously too, when I opened it up in September, but, so only some

13:16of those had converted. So yeah, that kind of gives you a sense.

13:23All right. So, building momentum. So, it's pretty simple, the roadmap that we followed for this but basically about a week ahead we mentioned it on social media. I kind of do the build in public thing on Twitter a bit and that is where my a lot of my customers right now, founders and people in the Startup space are hanging out all the time so it happens

13:52to align pretty well with with the SavvyCal business. So, posted about it there to let people know in advance and sent an email to customers in the launch list, letting them know. And also, like Rob was mentioning before, the concentric circles reached out privately to people in my network to also give them a heads up because that's kind of a group that you really will want to deliberately recruit on Launch Day to help you out and make sure that you're getting the initial lift

14:24to get your post going with some traction on Product Hunt. And so really the goal here is just to let people know and let them know that you'll appreciate their support, of course, you're not soliciting upvotes because it's something you need to be careful about, we'll talk a little bit more about that, but yeah just giving people a heads up.

14:49All right. So, next we'll talk a bit a little bit about crafting your post and this is some actual texts that used in (indistinct) to give you a sense. So just say the name of your product and a tagline that something that could basically fit well as an H1 on your marketing site. Description, little bit more but not too long. For the website we created a specific landing page

15:15just savvycal.com/producthunt. And I think I have a screenshot of that a little bit later but basically a copy of our homepage with a banner on it that said, welcome product Hunter to something a little bit personalized. And that helped out with kind of just tracking, keep looking in analytics and seeing how many people had landed their first, kind of it's just an easy way to get a sense

15:37for how the listing is doing. Some people also like to give a special discount or promotion and you could obviously throw that on that page as well, we decided not to, but I think that's certainly something you could consider. I did record a brief video demo. And, so basically you have to upload it to YouTube and then Product Hunt allows you to paste in a YouTube link and they feature that kind of as the first thing that people see when they look at your post

16:08and it auto plays. And so, the kind of the approach we took was 60 to 90 seconds of a very personalized video for Product Hunt. So I started out with me, (indistinct) Product Hunt, thanks for checking out SavvyCal, here are some of my favorite features of the product that I think you're really gonna love, and I just kind of highlighted some of the most compelling features that I thought, this kind of community of people

16:35who are early adopter types would really appreciate. And, I think that really helped us get lift. And then, screenshots...(indistinct chatter) - Was it highly produced? - Okay. - Sorry, was that part highly produced with music or just kind of? - It was not. Yeah. So I guess, turn on ScreenFlow and had my little face in the corner, and intentionally kept it like kind of low fidelity, wanted it to feel pretty personal, I think that tends to, that was a piece of advice that I was given

17:07like, it doesn't have to be highly polished in this case. And so even, you could even do a loom video. I happen to use screencasting software, but either one would work.

17:21Yeah. And then a handful of product screenshots that I sort of stylized a little bit but mostly just kind of demonstrating some key parts of the product, you'll wanna pay attention to the sizing of, so I think it's 1270 x 760 pixels and that way they won't truncate or like clip off the edges of your images.

17:47Okay. And then you also wanna write kind of your first comment from you as the maker, and you wanna post that on Launch Day as soon as your post goes live, you wanna make sure to put that out there. And ideally it kind of it'll get the most upvotes just as being the first comment from the maker, and so that's sort of your message to see the discussion thread

18:11and it'll kind of be pinned there at the top. And sort of the structure we followed was, hey, I'm Derrick, founder SavvyCal, you may know me from Drip or whatever, just a little personal anecdote there, and then kind of stating the problem. And you want this to be kind of really tight copywriting so we use bullet points and make it pretty skimmable. And then you're stating the solution and the call to action

18:37is let me know what you think. And so you're just trying to be very open

18:44to people, discussing and that's kinda the posture you wanna have on this to encourage people to drop a comment. - Quick question, Derrick from Pablo Fernandez and I believe the answer is no, but he said did you use Product Hunt Ship? And I had to Google that because I didn't even know what it was, it's like, I don't know, is it something

19:05you pay for? I mean, it's like, you can enter email and they'll, it's widgets and stuff to help you get more traction with your, a toolkit for makers to ship off some products. But I don't exactly understand what it is. Yeah. I guess it is, there's a monthly subscription. So, did you use that at all?

19:20- Yeah, we did not. So you see, I think part of the Ship thing is like those upcoming pages that people will post like as kind of a replacement for a prelaunch landing page or something. So, one thing that I considered doing and actually Corey Haines, who I worked with on marketing stuff basically told me I didn't need to worry about this too much, but I was a little concerned that my posting would get scooped, that someone would post it before the day that I had officially planned to launch on Product Hunt, which is always a risk 'cause anybody

19:55can just post any product that they want on there. And, I think that Ship has something in it where you can technically like lock it in and prevent someone from doing that. But Corey's take on it was that, the Product Hunt team is actually very willing to work with people on this, so like if someone does that and you were planning a launch coming up you could just kinda message them and say, hey, we're planning to launch it on this day,

20:23can we take this post down for now? And I think they're willing to work with you on that because ultimately they want you to have a big splash too, it only benefits them to have these really well executed launches on their platform and not catching makers flat-footed. So yes, we decided not to not to use any of that Ship stuff.

20:47- Sounds good. What's next? - All right. So just a quick little screenshot of our listing. And so you can see that the demo video, this is what shows and it's in auto plays right when you see it, so that'll be right there and then your product screenshots. I have just kind of a little array of them here. I'll just put little captions at the bottom,

21:12seem to work pretty well.

21:18And this is what our landing page looked like, a little banner at the top, kind of tweak to call the action a little bit to say, claim your username to imply a little bit of, just a little bit of FOMO, perhaps.

21:35All right. So, leading up to your launch, this is kind of a pro tip, it's not absolutely necessary, but it potentially is beneficial to recruit someone who has high reputation on Product Hunt to hunt your product for you. I think this used to be an even bigger factor in the past. And, this is one of those things where like the Product Hunt algorithm, no one really knows

22:01on the outside what's going on entirely in there. But sometimes people do have have issues, some like their product will be on there for a while and then just kind of get pulled off the main page for some weird reason and just weird things can happen sometimes. So this is one of those things, like it's not guaranteed to help, but it definitely can't if you ask someone

22:24like Heaton Shaw, he's a very helpful guy. And he agreed to post ours for us and he's hunted probably thousands of products to point. And the nice thing is it can, hunters can schedule, I think a few hours in advance, so they don't have to be too inconvenienced to like click the button right at midnight for you. - Did he have to post all of your assets, did you have to send the video and all the images

22:52and everything to him in order to get that to work? - Yep. - Wow! So there is some work on the hunter's part? - There is, yeah, there's a little bit of work so make their job easy, that stuff I outlined, like all those pieces of metadata you wanna make sure to have it very easily copy and pastable for your hunter. And so I think we maybe had like a little Dropbox folder or like a Google Drive folder or something that had a doc with all that information

23:20and all of the images named one, two, three, four, five. So he knew what order to post them in and yeah, make their job easy for them. But they do have to do a little bit of legwork on that. - Another question from an audience member is did you already have a relationship with your hunter

23:38or did you reach out to him just for this launch? - Yeah, so I kind of, Heaton Shaw is in the TinySeed Mentor Network and actually Corey had a relationship with him as well and Corey did the outreach for me. So, I'm not gonna say that I'll volunteer Heaton to launch anyone's product but I think he's a particularly helpful guy and I think a lot of the kind of people who do a lot of posting on Product Hunt are generally speaking, very willing to help if a founder kind of called, reaches out

24:15to them and makes a good first impression. - Yeah. And MicroConf itself is a connector, right? Because I know when folks reach out to Patrick McKenzie or Heaton Shaw or Steli FD or Jason Cohen or, I mean the list goes on and on, and you look at pretty much any MicroConf speaker, if you say I attended MicroConf, I've seen your talks and can you give me advice or can you hunt my product

24:38or can you do whatever? They are usually quite willing to do it because the community is so strong. So, I would use that as a, just as a point of connection is all it is, right? It's like, I'm in the community and so are you so, awesome. - Yep. - What's next? - Yep. Cool. So, let's talk a little about Launch Day. So, a couple hours before, and so Launch Day officially starts by the way at midnight Pacific Time, that's when Product Hunt deems

25:07it's the next day. And so to increase your chances of accumulating the most upvotes you wanna post, right at midnight. And so, a couple hours before that midnight time you wanna make sure to announce it on social channels, hey, this is coming, and give people a little bit of anticipation there. And then, right at midnight submit to Product Hunt. And like I said, the Hunter can, whether it's you hunting or someone else on your behalf, you can, should be able to schedule that in the Product Hunt interface

25:39a couple hours in advance. I kind of was on the fence on whether I was going to stay up in the middle of the night 'cause this 2:00 AM Central Time. And I think my internal clock naturally woke me up. (laughs) I was asleep for a few hours before that. And, so, yeah, it's an exciting time, when it goes live. And usually, I saw a little bump in comments and upvotes and definitely spent about an hour or so tending

26:12to that thread before catching a few more hours of sleep. But yeah. So submit, Product Hunt, schedule an email announcement to your customer's launch list, posts, I think Indie Hackers has a specific like Product Hunt category so you can announce to the community there, MicroConf Connect is a great place, right? Any Slack communities that you're in, like that, we kind of just try to make it anywhere where you could find me all roads pointed to that post for the day, so I changed all my social bios and just tried to drive everyone straight to that post that'll link

26:52in directly to the SavvyCal website, driving everyone there. And, yeah, so I can show you, this is the tweet that we sent.

27:07I think I double advanced, let's see. Yeah. That's weird, slides not in there. That's okay. - We did a little skippie. - So I had a couple of screenshots, yeah, a couple of screenshots of the tweet and the email that went out and I can post this deck in the in the Slack channel or wherever is best

27:27to put it so you can kinda see that content. All right. So, early morning, so as couple hours into your launch, it's good to work your concentric circles a bit and privately message your friends. And this is where things can be a little more, as long as it's in private, you can be a little more direct

27:48about your ask. So, of course you're asking for an upvote, it's good to have people write, leave comments there and leave review so especially if they're a customer and outline some pros and cons, people can get a little skeptical if everything is positive all the time. So it's kinda good to get a nice balance of like I love this tool because of this, and maybe the tool is not so good for you if you're this then, to kinda help people get a sense for why they should care about this product,

28:21make their job easy. Leaving comments, voting comments and marking things is helpful is just helps the whole post get lift. And, of course re-shares, re-shares throughout the day. And, you as the, yeah, go ahead. - I was gonna say, upvote, you can of course ask for upvotes, it depends on how you wanna to tackle it. I know Product Hunt says, please don't ask for upvotes in public, ask for support and that's their-

28:53- Yep, exactly. - Thing, if you're just asking for upvotes and technically maybe you're gaming the system so you have to use your own internal judgment of, hey, if I'm gonna be in a private Slack channel and I'm gonna message 10 of my people, do you say, hey, I could use your support here?

29:06Do you specifically say I could use upvotes? Again, you have to go with what you feel comfortable with. - Yep. And I kind of doubt anyone at Product Hunt would know or fault you for, if we're doing a small limited outreach to your own friends, I mean, that's kind of a, that's a given that that's gonna happen but you definitely don't wanna go too crazy with it, keep that tight, people know how to show you support so you don't have to be too specific

29:35to violate any terms or anything like that. So, yeah. And then the biggest thing you can do is just, throughout the day plan to not really get anything else done that day, (giggles) stay engaged in the common thread. People may have random questions that technically are already answered other places, but just, be very kind and helpful and show that you're not just dropping this over here and expecting people to show you support

30:05without you engaging with them. So just be present.

30:14So, yeah, it's just a couple of dos and don'ts, do make noise about your posts throughout the day. So, we kind of had a loose plan of, at a couple points throughout the day I was going to post some tweet threads about, hey, we're on Product Hunt, just kind of mentioning that and then, here's a little comparison between us and a major competitor or here's kind of the story, the launch timeline of how we got

30:40to this place. So just kind of, trying to keep it in front of people's radar, not in a spammy way, but just, so that you're kind of having your day in the spotlight on any social channels where people might be following you as well. And don't, again, don't publicly solicit upvotes and definitely don't buy upvotes. I think there was some interesting activity on some posts that were on the same day as mine and where they were adding something like 100 votes an hour, or something like that, and it was,

31:21I think something sketchy was going on. But, what actually interesting anecdote about that later on, about a week later, I think Product Hunt goes through and kinda coles any votes that were from bots or potentially purchased. And so you will see sometimes your vote counts get readjusted as they do kind of their cleanup in the background.

31:51All right. So, post-launch obviously thank your supporters for helping out. You can add your nice slick little Product Hunt badge, if it's achieved the kind of success that you wanna, that you feel like would be helpful to show to people. So we threw this in our footer, a little featured on Product Hunt badge with our upvote count. And then we decided to add this little PS line to an onboarding email that goes out

32:20when someone signs up for the product at first. And, because we ended up with 200 and something comments there, it actually became a nice repository of social proof and people kind of sharing their experiences using the product. And, so similar to like, those review sites, your Product Hunt post be a nice kind of repository of that. And the nice thing is people will continue to upvote over time, and that helps with some of these distinctions, like number one of the week, number one of the month or number, whatever, but it helps you continue to rise

32:54in the ranks even past your day in the spotlight.

33:01- 2000 votes, man, that's impressive. It's a lot of (muffled speaking) - Yeah. Like I said, totally blown away by that. (giggles) - Awesome. We have a lot of questions coming in, I think I have probably three or four more but I do wanna hold off, you just have a couple more slides? - Just a couple more. Yep. - Cool. Why don't we finish these out and then I'll start digging in, I mean, I think there's at least maybe somewhere between three and five questions that we can kind of start cranking through and other folks feel free to add and I know we're going a little long,

33:30we obviously started late, but in addition, one of the beauties of doing this live is that the questions are coming in and I'd love to be able to go through those. So, keep going with this and then I'll pop back in a couple of minutes. - Cool. Sounds good. Yeah. So the other thing that happened to us is, we did really well on our day, we achieved the number two spot, and what that meant

33:56was we were selected to be featured in the newsletter. And so, this is again one of those things completely beyond your control, it's kind of the editorial staff at Product Hunt that makes these decisions. But we basically got notified like, hey, we're gonna put you as the feature in the newsletter and this ended up driving a two times the amount of traffic

34:19as the initial launch day. So that turned out to be kind of the real prize of the Product Hunt launch was the newsletter feature because I think their list is, I don't know, 300,000, 400,000, something like that. And so, that goes to show the power of email. (giggles) Unfortunately, it's one of the things

34:36that you have very little control over, but do be prepared. So, that was the other thing, tons of support emails came in, I kinda had a question, a few questions in the initial onboarding email that goes out like, hey, how'd you hear about us and why did you sign up? And definitely a lot of people took me up on that. So I think I fielded somewhere around 1000 emails in the month of January just as a result

35:07of the Product Hunt launch that shows you the traffic. On the 7th was Launch Day and then the 8th was Newsletter Day, it's a uniques versus page use there.

35:23And so, advance, one more time.

35:34- It's gonna double advance. Yeah! Back to the first slide. - Can I wrap around? Let's see if I can do this. - Yeah. Try to wrap it, yeah. - We're doing this live. (laughs) - The show must go on. This is the best about live. I can't wait, I'm waiting for the dog to bark

35:48at the UPS person. I'm waiting for another kid to crawl in army-style under the camera. So you just want your last slide basically? Yeah? - Yeah. It's okay, it's not a big deal. Basically, the last slide is a thank you slide and before that are my two parting thoughts, which are enjoy your time in the spotlight

36:08but also make sure to manage your expectations. And if it doesn't pop off like the SavvyCal launch did, it's not necessarily your fault, and all you can do is you're best at trying to set yourself up for success and just treat it like an experiment. - Awesome. And obviously this is one of those things I was talking about earlier that they don't scale,

36:30but to get 4K of them right off the bat, it's pretty sweet. All right. So, I know we're running along, I wanna answer all these questions. So, obviously if you have a prior engagement, you have to leave, the video will be available to you as a MicroConf Promote ticket holder, but let's dive into these questions 'cause that's a great, it's a great story, and I love how you set expectations of like, hey, this isn't gonna happen for everyone, but this is what happens when things go really right, I mean, I think that's what I'll say is like you did a lot

36:59of things right and you got a little lucky, right? There was both aspects to it 'cause you can do everything right and get 50 votes, you can get a little lucky and get 2000, but you did both. Question from Chris Engelhardt, he said, do you know your churn for the Product Hunt cohort compared

37:17to your average churn rate? Do you know how many dropped off after the first month, even if it's ballpark? - Yeah. That's a great question actually. And it's something that I didn't have a great sense before even though we had launched and we had, several hundred customers, like I mentioned the churn pre-Product Hunt was effectively zero, like it was very, very small and that's one of those artifacts of early stage SaaS where you have mostly people who are a super great fit or from your kind of personal network and they're just very unlikely to churn,

37:49and that doesn't last forever, right? So I didn't have a good sense of what my actual churn rate was gonna be for the particular market segment that I was targeting but that was sort of anxiously awaiting for the month following Product Hunt and churn was decently high, I think we had around 12% for that initial month. And things have started to taper off a bit, we're below 10 right now, but it definitely is still higher

38:19than I would want it to be. And so, I'm keeping an eye on it and thinking about potentially tackling that, weighing that against adding more features that a bunch of people are requesting, wearing many hats. But I'm curious to see how long this, if churn is gonna drop off as kind of, we get further away from the Product Hunt reverberation from launch,

38:45but time will tell. - Very nice and Santiago asks, would you consider launching? But I think he means, submitting to Product Hunt again, after a major integration or a major feature, like let's say you integrate with Zapier or you add just a huge, member Drip workflows, right? Where it's like this really changes the app, would you consider submitting to Product Hunt again

39:09at that point? - I definitely would, yeah. I think there is such thing as too much. And Corey had some experience with this actually because he's formerly at Baremetrics. And I think for a while they were really kind of pushing hard on this, every major feature they would do kind of a Product Hunt launch. And you do end up kind of, you can end up overtaxing that channel a little bit and I think Product Hunt doesn't wanna see,

39:39too many small features being like promoted there. But I think if it's something really big and meaningful like I'm building out (indistinct) which is gonna really open up, at least 2x the addressable market that we have, because it's another Calendar integration. I think that potentially could be a good one to try to craft a launch around. So yeah, I'm definitely planning to experiment more and probably not more than a couple times a year at most

40:10for this kinda thing. So I'm thinking about it. - Yeah. Given how much effort it is, I do think it's something that you wanna use sparingly. Next question. Would you say a Product Hunt launch is better suited for software products built for wide audiences? Do you think it would work for software serving a niche market? - Yeah. I mean, my sense is that it definitely,

40:32because it's just a very undifferentiated set of people. Like, it's a very broad group. So the more broadly appealing your product is the better chance it's going to resonate with more people, it just that just logically makes sense. So I think if you're building a software for construction contractors, countertop installers, whatever, like how many of those people are gonna

40:56be on Product Hunt? Very few compared to, the people who are in the market for a more general purpose scheduling tool, for example. So, yeah, I think your mileage will definitely vary a ton based on how niche your product is. - Question from Daniel, he says, have you ever tried launching to Product Hunt and thereby focusing the attention of your existing network there, i.e., linking from your Twitter or similar so that, let me finish the question and then I'll clarify I think, to get more attention on Product Hunt by people who don't know

41:31you when you hopefully get upvotes from your network. I think what he's saying is, actually launching your product on Product Hunt or launching a feature on Product Hunt, and instead of when you email saying, hey, come to savvycal.com and tweeting that out and actually send them to Product Hunt instead. Now I know you did a product launch 'cause you launched SavvyCal a few months earlier and then you did Product Hunt launch decoupled

41:57from that, in essence, right? - Right. - And that's how I would recommend it. I've seen people try to do both and when you do both, if you go all in on Product Hunt and it doesn't get the traction, no one, you get no visits to your website, you get no conversions, it's pretty risky to do that.

42:12Would you be in sync with that? - Yeah, definitely. I think so. And, the other advantage of launching a bid in advance is having those real customer testimonials that people can actually leave. If your app's been kind of open to the public for a few months, at least that's super valuable, I think. The further away from vaporware that you are the better.

42:35- Right. - And yeah, so like we definitely drove like day of as the launch was going on, pointed all links away from the homepage and straight to the Product Hunt page so I think for a limited period of time it makes total sense to do that. I think for even, maybe for like about a week or so after the launch, we kept, on the SavvyCal Twitter profile and on my Twitter profile, the URL was pointing to Product Hunt,

42:59but I would only do that for a pretty narrow scope of time. - Yeah. So again, to reiterate if I were, I think Derrick and I are on the same page with this. If I was launching a brand new product, I would build my launch list, I'd build a Twitter following, whatever, and then I would launch to my own audience,

43:14I would not involve Product Hunt at all. And do the email, do the tweet, do whatever, get everybody in, like you said, get the testimonials. And probably about a month later, maybe two, I would then do a Product Hunt launch decoupled from the initial launch. Next question is Product Hunt recommended when your product is a tool or service that may include people who are familiar with Product Hunt, but most of your customers might not be familiar

43:40with it, or is everyone aware of Product Hunt? I would say not everyone's aware of Product Hunt especially depending on your niche, I mean, it's a small subset of our spaces. But again, the question is would you recommend Product Hunt when your product is a tool or service that may include people who are familiar with Product Hunt but most of your customers might not be familiar

44:01with Product Hunt? I'm not sure. - Yeah. I mean, I guess the risk, maybe saying like the,

44:10if it's like a dramatically different market. Like, I think I would suspect that a lot of people who are actively engaged with Product Hunt are more of the early adopter types. And if you're building a product that is predominantly for people who don't spend a lot of time online and are not particularly early adopter types then you might be potentially opening yourself up to an influx of people who aren't really a good fit anyways, and that's always the risk with kind of dropping your product in a place where like, people aren't are necessarily

44:49the right type of customer. But I also think that when you're early on, it's like, it's hard to know exactly how many potential good customers are in that audience, who's to say? You can't really know that for sure anyways. So, the risk is that you clog up your support queues a little bit with people who are like expecting something different than what you're actually offering, that's always a risk that you run but I think the benefits probably outweigh

45:14the risks in most cases. - Excellent. We're gonna wrap up here in the next couple of minutes, we do have a couple more questions. Do you think a Product Hunt launch would be worth the effort for a B2C product, business to consumer, specifically a more niche B2C product? My answer to the first one is B2C yes, probably. Niche, I don't know, that there's always a play

45:40with their, what do you think about those? - Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of B2C like apps seem to do pretty well. I mean, it's just from watching listings over time, like the more consumer grade a product is the better shot it has at kind of popping off on a site like this, so if you've really focused on simple mechanics and good design and something that a consumer would like, those have probably

46:11a better chance of succeeding. That sort of the product approach that we've taken with SavvyCal is trying to really, really, really nail a simple, highly polished user experience. I think like the flip side is like some very specific line of business application where it doesn't actually, it's like complex and doesn't look appealing but solves a very specific problem for a niche, like I think that's probably less likely to resonate with kind of a drive-by audience of people who are looking for hot, cool new products,

46:44if that makes sense. - Indeed, it does. Another question from Tony, at CloudForecast. He says, I know this is hard to attribute, but do you know which of the channels helped with your Product Hunt launch the most? (sighs) - That is hard to attribute. - It's okay to say no. Yeah. - Yeah. I don't know because I do, I mean, I do quite a bit of the building and public stuff because it seems to resonate with my potential customers

47:16when I share openly about stuff. So I had been doing that for a while, and you can't just start this overnight, right? It's something you kinda gotta, you have to invest in that as a channel for getting people interested in your product. But, so I'd been doing that kinda the whole time, so when I posted this on Twitter, it got a lot of lift, it drove a bunch of traffic there, I don't know

47:37how much traffic it actually drove to the Product Hunt post. But I think I'm still very, very bullish on email as like probably the best way to communicate to somebody that, hey, I would like support, we're on Product Hunt and sending that via email.

47:58I probably appreciate that channel a bit more than social which is more like, is the algorithm going to surface my tweet to people or not? Who knows, but at least with the email you can land in someone's inbox.

48:11- Yeah, there it is. All right. Two more questions. One is from Matt (muffled speaking) and he says on balance it sounds like the Product Hunt launch was a success for you, relative to other things that don't scale, where do you think it rates? (grunts) That's a tough one, because I mean, you compare it to AppSumo and it's like, well, AppSumo is certain to, if you get accepted, you're certain to get something out of it but there's also a risk

48:38there that you could cannibalize, there's just risks there. At Product Hunt the risk is that you spend a bunch of time and it doesn't work. It's more of like an ESEO or a viral play where you're gonna try to do, a clickbait thing around, some news item and if you invest the time to write the eBook or write the blog post or whatever, and then nobody picks it up,

48:59yeah, then you've wasted time. - Yeah. I guess like, yeah, in thinking of in terms of like time investment versus potential return, we probably spent, I don't know, between me and Corey maybe like eight hours or so kind of writing the copy, creating the screenshots, recording the video, talking to Heaton, recruiting our hunter, and just kind of outlining

49:28the launch process and coordinating that. So it was a decent time investment, but then not like, it's not like we were spending weeks on this trying and that was intentional too because I was like, this could go absolutely nowhere so we wanna not overinvest in it too much. And, so it's probably more investment than like trying to write a catchy manifesto

49:51that you try to get lift on Hacker News or something, right? A little bit more than that, but certainly like an AppSumo launch, for example, like that could potentially create an enormous support burden then you have to kind of increase staffing for that, and there's a lot, instead I consider something like an AppSumo launch is potentially a lot more disruptive or takes more time investment than Product Hunt

50:21as an experiment. - Very nice. And our final question for your keynote session for Matt Gail, he says what made you decide to not include a promotion or launch deal with your Product Hunt launch? - Yeah, that was just sort of a call that we made, I think because it's already a decently low-priced product. And, really I was trying to optimize for getting revenue

50:50in the door. So, I mean, something is always in the works then in the plans to potentially experiment with Freemium or experiment with, deeper discounts or affiliates and that kind of stuff. But early on, especially my mindset, end of last year as I just was having my first couple of hundred customers was that, no, I want to just, I want to propose this to this community and I want only people who really are interested and value the product to pay the price tag that I'm charging everyone else,

51:24those are the people that I want in the door. And so I was a little worried about overly incentivizing people by making it really cheap and potentially seeing a bunch of churn or a bunch of kind of poorly fitting customers, I guess, is sort of how I was thinking about it. - Derrick Reimer, sir, thank you so much

51:43for joining me today. Folks can find you on Twitter, @derrickreimer and of course, savvycal.com if they wanna see the magic you're building. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. - And I have a special discount for MicroConf attendees, so you go to savvycal.com/microconf, it's a coupon code there 20% off your first year. - I'm gonna go sign up for that right now. I'm already a SaaS account user,

52:06Derrick's like don't do that. Yeah. Awesome. - New customers only. (laughs) - Of course. Awesome. Well, thanks for that man. - Thanks for having me. (upbeat music)