🚀TBBL#6: How Michael leveraged product hunt and generated 50,000 customers

The secrets and strategies behind the tremendous growth of Threado & Side Project Stack

Nov 24, 2022

Hey LaunchPilots,

This is Nithin and Karthik from LaunchPedia, How is your week going?

This week we interviewed Michael on his successful product launches and got tons of hacks for you to make your next launch a big bang 🚀

Before we get into it, here are some exciting updates for you to catch up.

💡Resources Spotlight

Don't offer free stuff if you have nothing to sell - an article by Jakob Greenfield on why you should stop giving out free products if you have no monetization plan.
Black Friday Deals - A curated list of the best deals online creators and Indie hackers can avail during this Black Friday 2022.

⚡A Quick Intro about Michael

Michael, Founder of Side Project Lead Growth, has launched 15+ products for startups and helped them acquire customers, generate revenue and raise funding. All organically from Product Hunt.

Some of his products:

Threado
AI Social Bio
Side Project Stack
bipp’d
V.One
Notion To-Do

Let’s unlock all his launch strategies and secrets

🎤Interview

Before going into product hunt stuff, Could you share how you got into product building?

Back in 2013-14, I was blown by how Uber and Airbnb had grown just by leveraging technology. And at the same time, I hated my job. So I thought of creating my something on my own and launched my own startup.

In the early days of my startup, we got some customers and it felt great, but after that, I had no idea what to do and how to scale it from there. That’s when I got into product management and served for 5+ years.

So when I quit there, I decided to share my experience and help startups scale by launching side projects. And that’s how I got into product building.

The Big Bang Growth Hack 🌱

You launched multiple products from Threado on Product Hunt, Any benefit from the launches?

We launched Threado (the actual product) in August and then launched eight side products branching out of it in the following months.

We hit many milestones from those launches:

We grew by 5X in the first 5 months and got thousands of new users and customer sign-ups.
Our target audience began to notice the value we were giving out with every launch and we were able to become the category pirates.
Launching on PH turned out to be a PR backlinking hack, where a ton of websites and blogs started sharing about us giving great authority to our website.
Threado was able to raise 3.1Mn dollars in Funding and penetrate into US market.

We couldn’t have achieved these results through paid ads or content marketing in such a short span.

When launching a new side product for Threado, you’ve always launched it as an update for threado rather than launching it as a new product on PH. why is that?

Yeah, There are 2 benefits to it

It improves the branding of the main product.
And, when people upvote your product, they follow your product. So, If you launch a new version, they will be notified about your second launch. So, you will get that initial boost from them!

The Big Bang Difference ↕️

Some of your launches got 900 upvotes and some of them got only 200. Was there any difference in the efforts you put in? or Any thing that didn’t work for the low-performing ones?

Well, I wish I knew it all. That’s what keeps me up all night (laughs).

However, I think it comes down to a few things:

Do people find your product interesting? Is it exciting or new?
Is it a high-traffic day? and
Who are you launching up against?

Also, If your launch started strong, you will keep receiving more upvotes as the day progresses. This is similar to the Google search-to-clicks ratio - like 80% of people will only click the first search result and the click rate drops as you rank towards the bottom of the page. The same applies to PH too.

And, there are certain things that are out of your control like your competitor buying upvotes or making use of upvote bots.

The Big Bang Debut 🦶

Your first launch “Side Project Stack” was a big bang launch on Product Hunt. How did you manage to generate the buzz for it?

There are a couple of things that helped that launch:

I launched it in 2019 when no code was catching steam and everyone was talking about it. I think the market reacted favourably as it was something new at that time (like AI nowadays)
And, I launched it on Twitter before launching on PH. The launch tweet got 26 likes and 20 comments. So I bookmarked that tweet, and when I launched on PH - I messaged those who engaged with the launch tweet.

You follow a problem-solution template for the first comment on your Product Hunt launch posts. Is there any reason for it?

I got that from Pieter Levels. I really love that template, as it plainly states what your product is and what problems it solves.

I believe if you confuse your visitors, you lose and nobody has time to read 5,000 words. So, I copied his template and it really helped my launches. Because that’s the shortest and simplest way to explain your product's value to your visitors.

You had a hunter for some of your launches. Did you get any edge by having a hunter?

In the early days of Product Hunt, the hunter’s followers used to get notified if they launch a product. That was the main reason to have a popular hunter for your launch.

But that doesn’t happen anymore. So I don’t see it being an edge factor nowadays.

However, having a hunter can still help if he/she has a good following on other platforms like twitter. As when they promote your launch, you will get some traffic from their profiles.

The Big Bang Traffic Sources ⛽

What are your top traffic sources for PH launches at the moment?

Twitter
Email List
Personal messages to my friends

I spread out the traffic throughout the day, instead of sending all the traffic in the beginning. I do that by segregating my email list & scheduling mails in the right intervals. Also, don’t forget, the aim is to start strong in the initial hours of launch.

The Big Bang Numbers 🔢

Could you share some numbers from your product hunt launches?

Yeah, I launched 16 side products for 8 startups and got around 50,000 customers.

The Big Bang Tools ⚒️

What are the tools you use for Product Hunt Launch?

Hypefury - Twitter scheduling
Notion - Planning
Images - Figma
Mailchimp - Email Marketing

The Big Bang Advice 🗣️

What are the advices you will recommend to beginners who are launching on PH for the first time?

Launch on Twitter first, and build your product in public. Collect all the handles who upvoted or commented on your tweets. And reach out to them when you launch on Product Hunt.
If it’s your first launch, definitely launch on Monday or Friday. You can also launch on Weekends but the traffic is too little on those days.

You’ve been following Product Hunt for over 5 years or more. How was product hunt back then & how is it evolving now?

Right now, I feel it has become much harder to rank on Product Hunt. The lack of transparency in the ranking algorithm creates a lot of distrust in the community. And I also don’t like bigger companies with large teams get to dominate Product Hunt launches.

I wish there was a way to help smaller guys or brands with 0 followers stand out when they launch.Maybe a special newsletter dedicated to them or something like that.

The Big Bang Gift 🎁

The Lean Side Project by Michael Novotny - The modern lean way to build your startup. For non-technical founders from non-technical founders who have generated millions of dollars in revenue building startups without code.

Thanks a lot, Michael for sharing your Product Hunt strategies and secrets with us.

🤝 Let’s Grow Together

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