Learning from Competition: B2B Saas Pricing Directory apps

Less than a month after launching our first eng tool to a decent 50+ upvotes, a VC-backed company did the same launch and got #1 Product of the Day.

This is what we learned.

B2B Saas Pricing
We made a saas pricing directory as a free tool for our agency. The idea is that we eat our own dogfood, get customers using free tools to get our customers more customers with free tools. (That last sentence made me dizzy).

The launch went as well as can be expected. We manually collected 200+ companies in an airtable and built a no-code frontend and launched it on a Tuesday (good day to launch).

We were happy with the result, polished it up and moved onto more launches.

Saas Pricing Explorer
Then I woke up to this. Dear reader once you move past the fact that Andy wakes up extremely early, imagine my surprise when I saw a clone of our product hitting number 1.

Except here's a problem. It doesn't matter that we did it first. They did it right, first. With better execution, they reached 10-20x the audience, thus no matter what we do now, to the people we reach after them we are the clones. Humans are annoying that way. Whoever is first to mind, is first to the market. Another reason why launches matter so much.

Learnings
Andy and I are in this for the growth. We're optimists by nature and we don't let stuff like this get to us easily. Very stoic. I swear. No really I am. Promise I am.

So once we wiped the tears away we got to work. Here's how they beat us.

Here's a detailed breakdown - Full video

Product

• Tags. They did a lot of manual work and got a ton of tags. The header tags in each pricing page has great qualifying info.
• Design. I’m interested in how shareable this was. Their “thumbnail” design looks great (what you see in slack) and the hero image and the footer is pretty simple, but it’s prominent and bold. Because both the thumbnail pic and landing page hero image look good, it makes it easy to share. Great use of logos as well.
• Curation. They have Explore (home page), Glossary (a breakdown of different pricing models), and Hall of Fame (which are the best), which is both informative and shareable.
• I really like their header too, they made the CTA to their business super prominent

Marketing

• They had a fucking video fml not playing fair.
• 1k+ followers on linkedin, so we can easily assume that some of the companies they pulled from were their own customers.
• Growth consultant.
• Funny enough the actual company page launch post didn't do nearly as well as PH
• They also had custom thumbnail images for producthunt launch, which looked super good.
• Did a good job showcasing feature set.
• They had someone else hunt them.
• No Twitter at all, pure linkedin and I’m guessing emails sent to an email list.

How we improve

We can't beat a VC-backed company that has funds to use an agency and hire a bunch of manual work. But we can beat them by being creative and getting to the right spots first.

Do ProductHunt launches even matter?

Of course they do. If a project doesn't do well it's not the end of the world but let's not kid ourselves. On the internet we need every advantage we can get. We're fighting for traffic and every little bit matters. Unless we have a strong brand and crazy traction already, we need to refine and optimize every step.

Plus if you hit the top of PH, you get press opportunities, social proof, and a crazy amount of backlinks.

Stay tuned for more updates :).