How Aaply got 1,300 users for their Beta from Product Hunt launch

A quick intro about Aaply

Aaply helps to work out the logic of the mobile app, plan flows, design wireframes, and move to the final UI stage.

Paul launched Aaply on 13th of February 2023 and hereis their launch performance

1. Upvotes: 1,046
2. Comments: 360
3. Day rank: 3
4. Week rank: 7

Let’s unlock all their launch strategies and secrets

Maker Interview

Hi Paul, Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you started your journey?

My background is pretty diverse — I worked in big international corporations such as MediaCom (WPP) and Yandex, along with smaller digital agencies. I came to product development from the world of marketing and advertising.

For the last 5 years, I have dedicated my life to product development and startups. Being a fan of bootstrapping, I have launched several products, the main ones being Flowmapp and Aaply.

My passion is to create value for the community and see how thousands of people use the tools created by our teams.

We noticed that you’ve launched multiple times on Product Hunt – What is the goal you have in mind when you decide to launch on product Hunt? Does it differ for every launch?

Every launch is different. The most important thing about any launch is that the product has to be good, and you have to know its audience.

Launching on Product Hunt is a huge event that helps you attract a lot of organic traffic for free, using only your team’s resources. And If successful, it can also attract media coverage.

PH launch helps to attract the attention of different audience segments: from investment fund analysts to bloggers, influencers, competitors, journalists, researchers, and indie makers.

Some of your launches like Aaply, flowmap have done really well on product hunt while others like Design landscape and personas tool haven’t. Have you found any reasons why they didn’t perform well?

I’ve launched about 7 times with different products and got over 5K upvotes in total.

For us, there is no such thing as an “unsuccessful launch”, because each launch has its own goal. If we are working on a huge standalone product, we understand that it will be useful for the audience, so we have to fight for the top position on Product Hunt.

But there are also micro-projects, such as content research, that we want to share with hunters – we do not expect huge coverage of them.

What did the launch plan of Aaply look like? When did you start preparing for the launch?

Our preparations began about 9 months before launch. We planned to launch earlier, the beta testing process dragged on. Therefore, when we set the launch day, all the preparation tasks were already ready and we just had to double-check everything, update some parts and write a plan for the launch day.

Our Product Hunt Launch Plan:

1. Prepare all product content that will be published on the launch page on PH
2. Prepare announcement posts on the Aaply socials
3. Prepare announcement posts for personal socials
4. Design and publish a banner for the landing page leading to Product Hunt
5. Work on contest mechanics and Twitter activities that will draw more attention to the launch
6. Gather a list of  Slack, Discord and Facebook channels to announce the launch
7. Gather a list of influencers to help promoting the launch
8. Gather a list of friends, acquaintances, Product Hunt friends, Facebook contacts who can be asked to support the launch
9. Create an email announcing about the launch
10. Prepare the messages for all communication channels
    
    

Do you create any waitlist landing page or lead magnet to get early supporters for your product? If so, how has it helped your Product Hunt launches?

Yes! Even before the product was ready (about a year in advance) we began to collect a waitlist. By the time we released the Aaply beta, there were 1100 people on the list.

But email marketing hasn’t worked for us very well as we got only 25% response rate for the beta invitation and launch day mails.

We noticed that you weren’t very active on twitter. How did you create buzz for your launches & what were the top traffic sources that got you the most upvotes on PH?

Yes, I don’t post on Twitter very often, but I communicate quite a lot with other makers in DM’s. I have a large Facebook professional community where I often post about businesses and startups. This audience helped a lot during the launch.

My TOP-3 sources:

1. Close friends circle (Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram).
2. Professional communities that I am a part of (Slack, Discord)
3. Our product’s communities (socials, blog, Discord)
   
   

Did you offer any special discount or launched your product as free exclusively for Product Hunt?

We don’t plan on making Aaply paid yet. The goal is to make it as free as possible. Therefore, on PH we marked the product as completely free, which also attracted a certain layer of the audience.

Do you offer any special discounts on launch day for PH members? Does it help increase your sales?

Yeah, we do give discounts on Product Hunt launch day. And we increase our prices after the launch.

Can you share the tool stack you use for ProductHunt launch?

We did not use any programs to help with the launch, everything was done by the team: by the hands of Designers, Developers, Marketing and Social Media Managers.

We monitored our upvote growth through Product wars 2. This tool also helped us identify that our competitors were using fake upvotes and bots 🙁

Here, we have described the whole process of searching and analysing bots, it will be useful if you are preparing for the launch.

Could you share how much sales, revenue & traffic you made from your product hunt launch?

Here is how Aaply launch performed on Product Hunt:

• +1,300 new users (4,010 in total now)
• +4,600 visits to the product page

TOP-GEO: US, Japan, UK, India, Germany.

Audience reach:

• Got featured on Product Hunt Twitter (25k impressions) + 2 PH email newsletters.
• The whole team received +300 points in karma, and I entered the “1st comma” club. Found a serious bug in the Schedule Post PH function.
• Our Twitter post with the link was reposted 38 times, with 12k impressions + individual posts from users.
• Invited to 3 interviews – a podcast, a newsletter, and a Twitch stream.
• Unexpectedly hit the Japanese product community (more than 100k impressions).
  
  

3 advice you would give to creators who want to launch on Product hunt?

1. Prepare for the launch as early as possible
2. Treat the launch like a marathon, not a race
3. Be creative, surprise your audience, and find creative ways to solve problems

And 3 Not-So-Serious Advice:

1. Stock up on 10 Snickers and 4 Espresso Tonics for the launch day
2. Feel free to ask for support from everyone, even your Colorado granny 🙈
3. Have fun!
   
   

Could you share what are the mistakes one should avoid while launching on Product Hunt?

1. If the goal is to get a lot of coverage, don’t launch on weekends
2. Do not be afraid of warming up the audience and gradually remind them about the product before the launch
3. Be ready to hear negative feedback about the product
4. Don’t launch for the sole sake of launching. Launch to grow the audience!
   
   

What are your future plans? What are your upcoming launches?

Today we are actively looking for investors, fixing bugs, and developing new features! After the launch, many users gave their feedback about the product.

We are also working on a big update, Aaply 2.0, which we will also present at the Product Hunt. But the date, for now, will remain a secret 🙂

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

Checkout Aaply for more details.