Stats from Typogram's Pre-order Launch: What We Learned from Product Hunt & What's Next

Two weeks ago we launched Typogram Pre-Order. Today we want to share our stats on the launch and reflect on how it went.

Stats for Two Weeks Since Launch:

• 16 pre-orders, and a potential “bulk order” in-coming
• 1,500 site visitors during the first two weeks.
  • 368 from Product Hunt, which is our top referral source
• 243 upvotes on Product Hunt, ranking at the 10th spot
• 15 upvotes on Hacker News, get on the front page of Show HN, on page 5 or 6 on the regular Hacker News.

What We Did to Prepare for Our Launch

• A few days before the launch, we started sharing snippets of Typogram on Twitter 
• We shared a teaser in our newsletter, Twitter and Reddit.
• We scheduled our launch at 12 am PST and scheduled tweets throughout the day (every hour), sharing more snippets of the app in short videos.
• We wrote copies beforehand so that we were ready to spread the word on the launch day.

Some Tips We Haven’t Tried 

According to our friend Ana, the first hour on Product Hunt is vital! We launched on the same day, and her product is at the 5th spot throughout the day, while ours climbed from 14th to 10th spot and finally got to the front page of Product Hunt in mid-day. She contacted a few friends before her launch to get the word out about her product. I think her strategy worked! I also noticed the top 1 product got more than 20 votes within minutes after launch! I don’t think it is organic. Once you occupy the top spots right off the bat, then more people will click into your product page throughout the day, and then proportionally, you will get more upvotes. Instead of rallying support at the beginning of the launch, I sent out the newsletter mid-day to promote our launch. I should send it earlier the next time!

Traffic Analysis

Different from our codingfont.com launch, which went on the front page of Hacker News twice, typogram.co didn’t get to the front page of Hacker News. This difference has a huge impact on the amount of traffic we get. CodingFont has 22,000 site visitors on launch day alone, 36,000 visitors within the first week, whereas Typogram only got 1,500 visitors for the first two weeks. 

Numbers cited from Stats of Coding Font Launch:

• 36,729 users visited codingfont.com, 
  • 22,000 on Launch day
• Among the traffic with a referral source
  • 43% from Hacker News
  • 4% from Product Hunt

For 1,500 visitors, we got 16 pre-orders; the conversion rate is not so shabby! The only problem is how to get more people to visit our site and know we exist. Getting onto the front page of Hacker News will definitely help a lot! 

I did more research on how to get on the front page of hacker news. One thing I learned is that every upvote on HackerNews front page roughly translates to 100 visits - so if the post has 200 upvotes, it should have about 20,000 visits on that day. That corresponds to my experience in the past. My projects got onto the front page of Hacker News about five times throughout the years; however, I failed to get the one post that mattered the most to the front page! It is a bummer, but I think there is hope to leverage other side projects that fit Hacker News’ appetite to promote our main business. I have always loved doing those side projects, and I think it is a growth hack worth a try! I am planning to develop CodingFont.com version 2.0 with more features and have a more prominent call out of Typogram in the design. 

Where Do We Go From Here? 

• More organic marketing. What we learned is that launch is not a single-day event. We plan to post about our product on other platforms, like Reddit, Elpha, and IndieHackers, and keep organic marketing until launch. We don’t intend to spend on advertisements before the official launch.
• Meet customers. We have already chatted with some of our pre-order customers about their use cases and why they pre-ordered. Listen to our customers and learn what we did right and where we can improve between now and the official launch. 
• SEO. I think for the long-term, search should be the primary driver for site traffic. We are publishing more premium content on our Typogram Blog to drive search traffic to our site. One of the lesser-spoken milestones with this launch is that we have moved our blog to the /blog subdirectory — the first major action to improve SEO!