Last week tray.io featured on Product Hunt, a growing community for discovering the best new products.

I was really impressed with the engagement, conversion and activity caused by the listing, so I figured sharing some of the numbers and our experience might be useful for anyone else checking out the site. 

Before I delve any deeper, a bit of background on Product Hunt. It’s the brainchild of Ryan Hoover and Nathan Bashaw, and is loosely based on the /IAMA subreddit - a place for community Q & A with interesting people. Once a new thread is created, it’s position on the page for that day is determined by votes (the ‘up’ arrow next to the thread title). 

Currently in beta, the site launched in November 2013 and has been growing steadily ever since. I discovered it through twitter chatter and signed up to receive the daily emails, a handy curated list of interesting new products.

Submitting a product

Currently new products are submitted via a scouting network of trusted users, it looks as though ultimately this will be opened up to the community. 

We were submitted by Dana (thanks!), who picked up a post on our blog, announcing tray.io in private beta.

Once we were submitted to the site, the community can vote / ask questions in the comments section.

Tip: If (like us) you have minimal information about your product online, make it easy to find - we hadn’t linked the blog to our landing page, therefore a lot of the traffic saw a very short description and signup box. I believe we could have increased conversion further by linking these earlier. 

Data

We were submitted on the 19th Feb @ 14:30 (UTC) and finished the day #1 on the leaderboard with 65 votes.

Traffic

Between the 19th-20th we received a total of 1,660 unique visitors to our landing page and blog directly from Product Hunt & the daily Product Hunt email. This resulted in 533 new signups for our private beta (32% conversion rate).

• All things considered this is a solid conversion rate, I’d actually estimate we’ve had closer to 800 new signups to date, but can’t prove that directly. 

Given the community is only 4 months old, the results are very impressive. The standout point for me was the quality of the traffic we received, alongside new signups we also had a solid volume of inbound questions / well wishers.

How we could have improved

Making sure both our landing page and blog were as informative as possible, there was some criticism that our landing page contained very little info.

In hindsight we could have used the comments section better to spark conversation, and make ourselves more available to the community.

Using a different URL for the submission, we could have tracked social chatter better (guess this is more a feature request for Product Hunt!)

I’ve got high hopes for the community moving forward, Ryan and Nathan have done a great job! Feel free to reach out to me on twitter if you have any questions, or I can help at all.

Side notes:

• There was zero optimisation on our part to target / increase signups, the landing page is very sparse (which the traffic was directed to) and the blog contained a single post outlining our vision. 

• We’ve seen a significant increase in signups in the days since, I believe this is due to the network affect Product Hunt brings.