Silke English
It’s crazy that Yodel’s Product Hunt launch is almost four months back! A lot has happened since then! Seedcamp – an early-stage fund – has invested in us and we continuously get positive feedback from customers! But probably none of it would have happened without Product Hunt! For us, the Product Hunt launch was the beginning of our success story, we got the attention we needed for Yodel to rapidly grow.
So, we want to dedicate this blog post to the Product Hunt team and tell you guys what exactly happened on the launch day:
We have been the biggest fans of Product Hunt since day one and were super excited when we discussed the idea of launching Yodel on the platform. Back then, Yodel was fresh in beta and we had no idea how people would react to it. Would we get upvotes? Would we have any chance to get to the front page? Would the Product Hunt users like Yodel?
We got in contact with Thomas from Blossom, who was one of the first Yodel Beta users and thrilled with Yodel’s abilities. He offered to post it on Product Hunt, and we finally set a date: March 10th.
Two hours before the launch, every team member was checking Google Analytics, the bot itself, and drank some more coffee to get the brain started.
Yodel went live at exactly 00:00PDT/08:00CET, so it didn’t take much longer to get launched on Product Hunt. Andre, our data nerd, got his cockpit ready to monitor our sites. And Mario had the idea to work on Screenhero the entire day to share our thoughts.
Finally, at 10:30 AM CET (deep at night for you guys on the west coast — so you most-probably were sleeping) Thomas posted on Product Hunt:
And shortly after, Product Hunt welcomed us via Twitter (our team was promoted as makers) which was, as you can imagine, pretty thrilling for us.
From that point on we were busy with the incoming AMAs. Make sure to be active on your Product Hunt page and answer questions right away! This will potentially lead to more traffic and therefore more comments on your page.
Ben from Product Hunt and Mike were tweeting about changing our header image on our Product Hunt page as it was not quite right in size and looks. The lively discussion between Ben and Mike took place via Twitter so the different opinions were shared publicly. It was quite a laugh for everyone :D You can check out the discussion here.
Ben and the other guys from Product Hunt were really fun to talk to and we very much enjoyed sharing our opinions with them and vice versa.
Meanwhile, our team was so focused on the upvotes Yodel continuously received that we almost forgot to record our success! Luckily, Mike found a pic he had taken to send to his wife, so we can show you the most important details… We couldn’t believe our eyes! NUMBER 1 (!!!!!) on Product Hunt! This was a huge success, and definitely one of the biggest ups on that day!
We’d been kept quite busy doing AMAs and at around 09:00 AM EDT we started to shout out to our friends in the US, to inform them that Yodel went live and had been launched on Product Hunt. This is another piece of advice we can give you: Just let your friends and business partners know that you have been launched on Product Hunt, if they are excited about that they will join the discussion right away!
At 11:16 AM EDT, the next big thing happened: Product Hunt posted us on Twitter!!
And some minutes later, well, pictures can tell it better than words:
100 upvotes!!! This was more than we could have asked for! Just WOW.
09:23 AM PDT was an internal milestone for us. During those couple of hours, we reached 50 companies that started to use Yodel as their business phone system in Slack. This means we gathered hundreds of new users by the time the west coast had breakfast! This may not sound like much but as we currently only target Slack team admins we were impressed!
At 11:42 AM PDT (9:42 PM CET), we reached #1 on webdesigners.com. This was another nice bonus that day!
A little bit later, we received questions from TrendingTopics (a cool Austrian online tech publication – check it out!) as they liked our product and wanted to know more about it. So once again our advice for you: stay connected throughout the day, try informing as many people as possible, and with a bit of luck, the Product Hunt launch can be a real success for you without doing one bit of marketing activities!
At 02:20 PM PST we were ranked #6 which is not too bad as we reached 145 upvotes and at 03:55 PM we achieved a solid 150 upvotes!!
That day had been full of excitement, surprises, and pure emotions, we were just wiped out so one after another went to bed (at that time it had already been midnight CET).
David left the chatroom first, then Mike, Mario stayed awake until 02:25 AM CET and Andre finally fell into bed at 2:30 AM CET.
Mike was the first to wake up the next day, there were 2 hours left for Product Hunt day and we wanted to make them count. We ended at #7 on the front page and 175 upvotes (while writing this post we had 242 and counting, you can check out our Product Hunt page here) and still got incoming questions, this was a perfect compliment for us as it meant Yodel kept being interesting!
We ended the Product Hunt journey by monitoring the origin of the Yodel users. This picture, to us, is absolutely brilliant. It had been outstanding to get so many teams on board, to have so many upvotes, to reach #1 (even if only for half the day) and finish as 7th, but this was the best that could have happened: Users all over the world trying out Yodel–this is by far the best compliment we could have gotten. Yodel in its basic form stands for connecting people, being able to communicate worldwide, and helping teams, whether they be start-ups or other organizations, to communicate wherever they are. And this picture is in our opinion the perfect fit for this mission!
Thank you Product Hunt for this amazing journey, it has been an outstanding day. The success on your platform truly created many great opportunities for us!
And to all the readers, we hope that we could give you some helpful pointers and wish you all the best for your Product Hunt launches!
