Launching a B2B App on Product Hunt

“What’s stopping you from launching this week?”

This was the question posed to us by Jared Friedman this past Fall during office hours for the Y Combinator Fellowship. This question prompted a frenzy as we prepared to publicly launch our company, Staffjoy, with just a few days’ notice. In the world of YC, a company’s launch represents a major milestone and should generate a lot of buzz to help accelerate the business prior to Demo Day. Since Staffjoy builds software that automatically creates shift schedules for businesses, we thought the best way to reach our target audience was through traditional media. Though we were fans of Product Hunt, we had initially written off the idea of launching Staffjoy there because we assumed that only B2C companies would be successfully featured through that platform.

It wasn’t until three days prior to our launch that we even considered showcasing Staffjoy on Product Hunt. During a call with Bryn Jones from GrowSumo, he shared how Product Hunt had been key to the successful launch of their reseller marketplace. Intrigued by their success, I realized that an interactive free trial experience might be valuable on our website. Therefore, with three days until launch time, we started building a free trial process, leading us to add Product Hunt to our launch-day plans.

On October 22, we launched on Product Hunt, Techcrunch, and Hacker News. The interactive free trial process that we designed for Product Hunt ended up becoming an important part of our overall product and sales lifecycle.

Our Results

My friend Jack Smith submitted Staffjoy shortly after midnight.

From Product Hunt, we received:

• 168 upvotes
• Placement as one of the top 10 featured products of the day
• 852 unique visitors (93.44% on desktop)
• 44 free trial sign-ups

Strategy

In general, optimize for the top of the sales funnel. All of these pieces of advice focus on a general strategy of trying to create happy users that give you upvotes rather than qualifying users. Upvotes improve your rankings, which generates a loop of more visitors. A small fraction of the visitors will be qualified, so you should focus on getting as many visitors as possible.

We fed the top of the funnel by creating an interactive free trial process. By focusing on getting users into a pre-populated version of our application as quickly as possible, we created a strong experience for visitors — even those who had no workforce to schedule. This resulted in upvotes, traffic, and some qualified users. If you focus too much on closing deals, for example by asking for a credit card during sign-up, you risk harming your ability to get upvotes.

Beyond closing customers, this strategy gave us benefits such as:

• Advocates who referred friends and family
• Other founders interested in B2B partnerships
• Social media buzz, press coverage, and investor interest

Specific Advice

• Find a qualified submitter — In order for your post to bypass the “Upcoming” page and go directly to the front page on Product Hunt, you need to be submitted by a power user (more details here). In general, the best way to do this is to find somebody in your network with a strong submission history on Product Hunt.
• Write an opening comment — As soon as the post goes online, write a brief comment explaining your business and its target audience. Pitching the product clearly and explaining who it benefits is key to its success. We wrote out critical parts, such as the opening comments, in a Google Doc the night prior to launching so that we could copy and paste when the time came.
• Ask friends to submit questions — The community reads comments, so ask friends to submit strong questions that give you an opportunity to explain your business. Design your ideal interview, then get friends to help create that in the comment section.

Our landing page for launch

• Design a great landing page — First impressions matter a lot, so make sure that your landing page looks professional and features multiple calls to action. It should build credibility while communicating what you do clearly. We sell a web application, so our goal was to drive users to a sign-up page. If you have a mobile application, consider something like LinkTexting to ease and quantify mobile downloads.
• Automate free trials — Make it easy for a user to create their own account and try out the application. We originally were manually provisioning accounts, so our automated free trial process was not live until a few hours prior to launch. Getting users into the application easily is critical.

In-app messages guide users through different sections

• Design the ideal user flow — Streamline the process as much as possible by minimizing the needed information(e.g. do not ask for password a second time as a confirmation), and get rid of unneeded intermediary pages. When users click our email confirmation link, they are automatically logged in and go immediately into the application.
• Prepopulate with data and have a guided tutorial — The worst thing for a user to see is a blank app. Therefore, pre-populate it with data, and then tell them what actions to take step-by-step.
• Filter qualified users at the end — Pick a success metric that defines a qualified user (for example, Facebook sets a goal of a user having 7 friends in 10 days). Use this metric to filter casual visitors from potential customers, and aim to put this action at the end of the tutorial. That way, you optimize the top of the funnel. For us, the last action in our user flow was adding external workers to be scheduled for the following week.
• Send Follow-up Emails — We automatically sent retention emails to users in the days following sign-up. This resulted in demos from users that had dropped off but were still qualified.
• Add a “Days Remaining” Banner — A simple, time-sensitive reminder, such as a “30 days remaining in your free trial” banner, is enough to get some users to put in a credit card and start paying.
• Allow credit card checkout — We originally focused on sales contracts, but letting users sign up for month-to-month plans turned out to be beneficial to the growth of our business.
• Intercom — Intercom was the single most important tool for our launch. We used it for in-app chat, in-app tutorials, a shared email inbox, tracking user actions, sending retention emails, and segmenting users. We spent the whole day of our launch talking with users via chat. Being responsive on the chat not only helps to close deals, but it also drives upvotes. It also allowed us to track user actions so that we could differentiate between qualified leads and casual visitors. We used in-app messages and timed emails after sign-up to drive this engagement. (A note — because we drove users so aggressively to sign up, the “Engage” package for anonymous website visitors did not provide much marginal value).
• Stripe — Make it easy for users to give you money.
• Elastic Beanstalk — On the technical side, we auto-scaled our application to meet traffic levels using Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk tool. Don’t let your website crash on launch day!
• Redis — Almost all of our application data was stored in a cache. This protected the core database, and it also let us serve complex example data to users when they signed up.

Experiments

• Pricing — We did not include pricing information on our homepage, and it was one of the most common questions that we received. We now have this information, but I do not know how readily-available pricing information would have affected our launch.
• Launch Deals — Creating a forcing function of a launch discount could have helped to close deals more quickly.

Conclusion

We had originally written off Product Hunt as a viable website through which to launch Staffjoy, but by focusing on an interactive free trial experience, we generated a strong number of upvotes with them, and this helped us to obtain qualified leads and create a successful launch!