Does "Upcoming Product" work for you?

Wojtek Krzciński
20 replies
Hey! Me and my friend created an upcoming product page as we are launching soon. We thought it would bring 100 subscribers easily but we only have 18. And it's been up for almost 2 weeks. I am not sure if it's due to poor promotion of this section on Product Hunt or is it our product's fault. I would say it's the first one. I thought that we pay for a marketing tool (getting some waiting list signups) and it seems like we payed for a signup form... Does any of you have similar experience or is it just me?

Replies

David J. Kim
It can be useful, but I think it's better to build your own audience and have them support your launch. You'll have much more control that way.
Wojtek Krzciński
@between_team @shariq_a Exactly, this is the difficult part or a part that few people notice these days. Most of us here want to sell what we're building so we should probably go some other place to find people who'd like to buy.
Wojtek Krzciński
@between_team How would you say it's useful? Do you have any experience with that? It definitely is best to build an audience. It just takes quite a lot of time and is difficult. We thought that there's a nice shortcut through Upcoming Product but it's not. We need to build an audience the normal way or try other marketing channels.
Shariq A
@between_team @wojtek_krzcinski Building audience is why we all are here but who is the audience? If everyone is a seller then our audience is going to be made up of all sellers :) Now product-makers are consumers of other products also but there is only so much we can buy from each other.
Victor David
@between_team @wojtek_krzcinski @shariq_a Yes Shariq, I think you nailed it. Been sort of wondering the same myself......
David J. Kim
@wojtek_krzcinski We had an upcoming page and they were notified when we launched on ProductHunt. I wouldn't say the impact was life changing, probably a dozen or so but we re-used materials anyways to make that page.
Shariq A
I would say that 18 subscribers is encouraging response. We skipped "Upcoming Product" after creating the page. We couldn't figure it out and then later learned that you can create the page for free but you have to pay if you want to make that page visible to everyone.
Wojtek Krzciński
@shariq_a Yes, I would say it's encouraging but when I see other projects have up to 1000s subscribers I feel like there's something wrong. As for the part of paying to make it visible, we also had trouble figuring it out. But after we did pay it seems to be less worthy than we thought.
Shariq A
@wojtek_krzcinski We are new to marketing and it seems like everyone is trying to sell us the formula we need to be successful. Our strategy is to experiment with the free services first and if we get some response from a particular marketing channel then we would gladly pay for their premium marketing services
Victor David
@shariq_a @wojtek_krzcinski Can you elaborate? I've only explored this part of PH a little bit. But: If you have to pay to make it visible, what's the point of the non-paying option?
Wojtek Krzciński
@shariq_a I would say it's something we did. We made it to #4 Product of the Day with BlogAudio https://www.producthunt.com/post... and got quite a lot of traffic so we thought PH is a great marketing platform. We payed for the Upcoming Product but it turns out it's nothing compared to regular PH launch. People are just not that interested in that section and it seems that PH does not promote it.
Wojtek Krzciński
@shariq_a @codemongo To be honest I don't really understand the free option. The only think it may give you is a "free landing page" if you're not into making one yourself. It's not visible to people who go to Upcoming Products section but you can access it through direct link so it is possible to get people to go there.