This past July, JOBBOX was featured on the famous community of Product Hunt (thanks @diogocteles for posting!). Some positive things happened after we were featured there and we thought that the results were worth sharing.
But first, what is Product Hunt?
Product Hunt is a community that just started in November last year. However, it’s now kind of the place to be for any entrepreneur launching a new product. The website was built around the community and everything there is highly curated, from the selected products to be listed, to the feedback given. Product Hunt has become a cool gathering ground for new apps and platforms and, from a founder’s perspective, it is a great opportunity to receive valuable feedback.
The results?
Our wide network helped a lot, but being up-voted by 144 people was awesome. Besides being considered a good product to take a look at, that score helped us to be on the top, making it to second of the day (only outpaced by the well-known Sunrise) and entering the Top 10 of the week.
Regarding visits and signups to JOBBOX, the results were also overwhelming. Until that week, we had an average of 930 views/week, and with the Product Hunt exposure we climbed to 6,000 views. The signups also increased by 6x, jumping from 50/week to 300, coming mostly from the USA but also Asia, Africa, Europe and Middle East. But the most important information for us was the number of “downloads” — i.e., the number of applications, referrals and job posts made on JOBBOX. After all, that number is key for the platform and its growing rate. With Product Hunt, we saw this number increase by 4x.
Besides improving our numbers, our Product Hunt appearance also initiated other great things that would be difficult otherwise. The most interesting was, without any doubt, the contact with our competition. Although none of us are doing exactly the same thing or doing things the same way, we act on the same recruitment market (a huge market, we have to say). A few competition founders commented on Product Hunt and we stayed in touch since then– chances are we’re grabbing a beer with @jongold around October 2014!
Furthermore, we were approached by several venture capital companies in Portugal (Shilling Capital Partners) and abroad (Accel Partners and Balderton Capital), and JOBBOX was also featured on a media website about technology from Dubai. If there is one lesson that we take from being listed on Product Hunt, it’s that it puts you on the radar of many interesting people.
Conclusion
Getting listed on Product Hunt is great and we definitely recommend it to any founder launching a new product. The process is very easy and smooth and the advantages are clear: attention and love from an enthusiast tech community, interaction with lots of people and our brand being spread all over the world.
Advice: bear in mind that this is just one more PR opportunity. You have to be careful about the feedback you receive and analyze whether it’s from your target customer or not (in our case it clearly was). Plus, these days being featured on Product Hunt is becoming as good as making an appearance on TechCrunch, but this shouldn’t distract you and make you lose your focus — what will bring you success is people paying to use your product, not press references.
That said, thank you Product Hunt for helping us get one step closer to turning the world into a place where referrals are rewarded!
Cheers,
Filipe Castro Matos
@filipecmatos
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