We recently dismantled our core product and launched a subset of it as a stand alone product on Product Hunt.
Our core product is social media marketing software, which includes content curation, content library, scheduling, community management, and analytics. It’s a premium product, marketed towards digital marketing agencies.
The tool is robust and accordingly, we have substantial overhead to keep it running.
We wanted to raise brand awareness and get more users on our platform, but offering our core product for free just wasn’t an option due to the associated overhead.
We thought of building a simplified social media scheduler to give away for free, but a lot already exist: Buffer, Hootsuite, etc…
So, we tried to think of another area that most marketers struggle with — another area where there weren’t many free tools.
Community Management!
There are countless great, free tools for scheduling posts, but not many, if any, for analyzing and responding to comments across channels.
We pulled the community management and analytics piece out of our core product to build Monitor — a free social media management and analytics platform.
The Results
Now the juicy part — the results of the launch.
In terms of Product Hunt launches, the release wasn’t very successful, but it was still a great boost for us.
It’s worth noting that we were featured by a reputable hunter.
Web Traffic
Over the 3 days, about 700 users trickled in to the site.
We had about 80 upvotes on PH putting us in about the 15th spot for the day overall. For social media tools, Monitor was in the 2nd spot for the day.
The 700 users lead to about 70 new signups. A conversion rate of 10% is nothing to sneeze at.
What’s even more important is that this led to an increase in inbound interest.
The number of quality, organic inbound leads 5xed after the launch. A couple of the leads turned into 5 figure deals which are currently moving through the pipeline.
We also had a private equity firm reach out in hopes of acquiring our company. The numbers didn’t quite make sense at the moment, but it was reassuring that they believe in our vision and see the same potential for the product.
Key Takeaways
Don’t undervalue free traffic.
Even if the visitors aren’t buying, if they at least click around the site and don’t bounce right away, you can see a substantial increase in organic traffic due to SEO benefits.
Find ways to repurpose your existing product. Monitor is just a subset of our core product. If we want, we can do the same with all aspects of our core product — Publish and Create could each be standalone products for another, future launch.