First Product Hunt launch - retrospective

About a week ago (12th September) I launched Art by an AI on Product Hunt - my first time posting there.

For context, Art by an AI is a daily competition. People submit and vote on prompts. Then at 12:00UTC the top 10 prompts are used to generate images using AI.

Overall, the PH experience was good, and I wanted to share some of the details with IH!

So here are some stats, numbers, and things I learned from the launch.

Stats at a glance:

Peaked at #5, finished at #6 overall for the day
152 upvotes
315 unique visitors to the site in the 24h launch window, 910 total pageviews
254 uniques, 824 total pageviews in the 24h after the PH launch
Over 90 prompts submitted in the first 24h
30 new subscribers to the Art by an AI notification emailing list
7 Instagram followers, 5 Twitter followers. And 4 personal twitter followers
0 sales

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the whole process because this has been written about before plenty of times.

Here's a few key things that helped.

Before the launch

Do some research and read up on how to launch on PH. One of the most detailed ones I saw was posted on IH here.

So research and make a plan. Choose the day you want to launch (I chose a Sunday), create your images and a video if you are going to use one, and write your copy. There are character limits for the product name, tagline, and description.

Create your post and schedule it. It doesn't really matter what timezone you're in, you should probably schedule the post anyway so that you have less to worry about.

At this point, if I had a substantial audience, I would be promoting the planned launch to them days beforehand. Unfortunately, I don't have a large following. But I still tweeted out that I had scheduled the launch and got a few comments. This was important, because this then gave me permission to reach out via DMs to ask for support on the day.

Why a Sunday?

There wasn't really a specific reason for launching on a Sunday vs any other day. But it felt like the right day for me. Mostly because there's less traffic and less competition compared to a week day. And it felt right to launch something more fun and entertaining on a Sunday compared to the more serious stuff people launch in the week.

It also helps that Sunday was a good day for me in terms of Schedule - I was mostly free for the day, so I could fix any issues if they came up (it all went smoothly thankfully). But it was reassuring to know that everything would be ok if things hit the fan.

The launch

There isn't that much to say about the launch day itself. I tweeted throughout the day posting updates (like when I briefly hit #5), and that the post was live.

I also posted here on IH to announce the launch. It didn't get any traction until the next day unfortunately. But people still supported even after the initial 24h.

There were probably other places I could've posted about the launch. But I didn't look into it too much and stuck with places that I was familiar with. I wanted to launch and I know that if I did more and more research I'd end up pushing back the date of the launch.

Like most people, it felt like the entirety of my day was spent refreshing different tabs - analytics, different PH pages, and the site. Checking on everything constantly to make sure it was going well.

Since Art by an AI is a competition that revolves around upvotes, there were a few people who did a little vote manipulation. It's not difficult to do. But I was surprised that people would even bother. They got downvoted by other users anyway, so it wasn't a big deal.

Traffic

I'm pretty pleased with the amount of traffic. There was just enough for there to be activity throughout the launch, but also not too much where it could get overwhelming.

When I checked the traffic from the couple of days I thought something was wrong. The numbers on day 2 were higher than the first, which was odd. Then I remembered that PH runs on a different timezone. So I changed the timezone on my analytics to UTC -8 it made a lot more sense. Day 2 had only slightly fewer visits. 254 vs 315 (unique).

Sales

Art by an AI offers prints (canvas and poster) of the art that is generated each day. There weren't any sales at all - though I wasn't expecting any either.

There are a few reasons that might explain the lack of sales.

People don't want prints of art
The generated art on the day might not have been appealing to people who are interested in buying prints
People don't know they can buy prints

And a combination thereof. The last one feels quite likely. The only part of the front page that says you can buy prints is a small line of text that says 'Available to purchase until the next batch is created'. And it's not obvious that you can click on the art to take you to the purchase page. I'll have to change that to see if it moves the needle at all.

There have been a few people who asked if I'd be offering the art as NFTs. To begin with I had no intentions of minting any NFTs. But I had an email from someone saying they had no interest in the prints, but would buy it digitally. So I need to look into them some more.

What did I learn?

To be honest I had a pretty good first experience launching on PH. There isn't all that much I'd change about it, other than maybe the day I launched. There will always be a 'what if I launched on a weekday instead?'.

There were a couple of things that I learned though.

Audience matters

With a Product Hunt launch it really makes a huge difference if you have an audience to share the launch to. I know that it's preached everywhere these days, but if it didn't have an impact you wouldn't hear it all the time.

On Twitter I don't have very many followers, so although I could share there, there weren't that many people who could go and vote right out of the gate - the product had to speak for itself. For most products the initial boost and consistent voting from an audience is worth a lot.

That doesn't mean it's impossible to get on the front page with no audience, it just means it's harder.

I know this is obvious, but seeing it first hand is pretty valuable.

You should create concrete goals for the launch

I went into the launch with a very open mind and no expectations just for experience. Which was fine. But now that I know what the experience is like, I definitely think creating some goals will benefit future launches.

Next time I launch something on PH I'm going to create a few concrete goals for the launch - whether that's a particular placement (top 5 for example), a number of sales, number of mailing list sign-ups etc. That way I can focus the copy and the landing page to direct the user down the right funnel.

Feel free to AMA!