How Moda got 3000+ Visitors from their Product Hunt launch

A quick intro about Moda

Moda is an ecommerce marketing platform that lets you speed up your marketing and boost conversions through emails, SMS, and forms.

Neil launched Moda on May 11 2023 on Product Hunt and here is how their launch performed:

1. Upvotes: 1,110
2. Comments: 337
3. Rank of the Day: 2
4. Rank of the Week: 3
   
   

Maker Interview

Hi Neil. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey at Moda?

I’m a designer turned marketer with a decade’s worth of experience in digital & product marketing.

From running eCommerce Ads for brands like eBay at $2.5Mn/mo, to building & selling UpGrad’s flagship Digital marketing course to 1000+ Students, , I’ve helped numerous brands with their marketing strategy. I joined Moda as the head of growth, and I’m now managing a 15+ marketing team to help eCommerce brands sustainably acquire & retain customers, with AI & Data superpowers!

What were your goals for the Product Hunt launch? Is it brand awareness, getting new signups or any other metric?

Our main goal was brand awareness & getting new signups from our target audience (i.e) eCommerce businesses & agencies. Since Product Hunt has opened a new dedicated category for eCommerce, I think this really helped us reach the right people in the community.

With an increased number of signups during launch day, we got to test how users respond to our in-app automations, and how customer success could handle user queries in a short period of time.

Apart from this, we also wanted user feedback – on our product positioning, our product demo, product features, and how community members saw us stacking up against our competitors.

At what phase did you decide to launch on Product Hunt?

We initially launched Moda on Shopify App Store in Feb 2023, post which we’ve gained a lot of traction from our early adopters. With the initial feedback we received there, and after pumping in more features – we decided to launch on Product Hunt 3 months post our Shopify launch. During this 3 months period, we decided to test the waters of Product Hunt by launching 2 free products.

You chose Kevin to be your hunter – How did you choose the hunter and how did having a hunter help your launch?

We had compiled a list of hunters, from successful past launches. Kevin & a few others came in our shortlisting. Kevin was nice enough to take our launch forward, completely free. Having Kevin on our side definitely gave us a boost in Upvotes in the 1st few hours.

However, I’d suggest you pick a hunter who’s hunted similar products as yours in the past (with similar target audiences) even if their followers are less than 10K on product hunt. it’s about relevance over volume.

Your previous 2 launches on product hunt (ChatGPT prompts and eCommerce templates library) didn’t rank in top 3. Did you find any reasons behind it, and what were your learnings from those launches?

While our eCom prompts template got had 500+ upvotes, it was a tough day for us launching with some really big products. Having said that, one thing that was missing with both our previous launches ( chatpgpt prompts and ecom templates), was a proper outreach & launch strategy.

While Product Hunt gives value to virality, with so many products launching everyday, you need to first ensure that users discover your product, and outreach is the best way. After speaking to others in our network, and seeing the outreach to upvotes conversion rates, we then started prepping for Moda’s launch. Our last 2 launches helped us create a 900+ Notify me list, apart from all our outreach activities.

How long did you take to plan for the launch – Can you share your step-by-step action plan?

We planned around 6 weeks before launch day. We realised that multiple members within our team need to be active in the community, foster relations with other makers, and contribute support & feedback in their launches.

Our launch strategy was divided into 4 steps.

1. 5 Week warm-ups – Our entire team did weekly cadences of outreaches to fellow makers, giving feedback to other launches, and partaking in community threads.
2. Last week sprint – We finalised our creative & content for social, emails to our users & content our founders, social channels, and maker teams, along with setting up a launch discount, and website copy changes, UTM tags, etc. We also collated results from our outreach activities.
3. Launch day sprints – We divided our team to take care of different channel communications, outreach lists & divided the day into 4 phases – keeping an upvote goal for each.
4. Post launch roundups – Once the results were in, and a good set of our team pulling all nighters – we dedicated the next day in reaching out to users who gave us reviews for more feedback.
   
   

How did you connect with other makers to ask for support for the launch? How did you make the list of people to reach out to?

Our earlier launches gave us perspective – which channels, how many people to reach out, what to ask them – and most importantly keep it relevant, and not spammy – as for us genuine user feedback was important.

We created a list of all the product hunt active users, looking at their day streaks. We then check where they were active – majorly Linkedin & Twitter. We kept a daily reachout goal for each member, which added to a weekly goal. Our outreach strategy was somewhat programmatic, and we kept updating our lists every week.

On the last week, we pooled in all our reachouts, and looked at how many users each of us got, who liked Moda & would give us feedback during launch day.

Apart from this we also connected with users across multiple Slack, WhatsApp & Telegram groups – who were interested in ecommerce growth products.

Did you have users for Moda before launching on Product Hunt? If yes, did you email them asking for support for your launch?

Yes, we’ve had a healthy user base before we launched Moda on Product Hunt. While we realised, many of our users may not have Product Hunt accounts, we did reach out to our active users on Email to give us honest feedback & support.

Can you share your action plan on launch day?

Our 4 phase action plan was tailored around reaching out to our outreach network in batches, keeping timezones in mind. In each phase, we reached out to Product Hunt community members that all of us were connected to across different channels.

We also had our social team activating on different social groups & channels from slack to telegram, reaching out to our startup network communities, while keeping our Moda social space alive with launch updates, special Product Hunt launch offer, etc. every 6 hours.

What were the top traffic sources that got you the most upvotes on PH?

1. Our 900+ Notify Me list on Product Hunt
2. Outreach list on Linkedin,
3. Outreach list on Twitter, Facebook Groups, Telegram Groups – in this order.
   
   

Could you share some numbers from the Product Hunt launch? (Website visits, new signups & revenue)

1. Website Visitors – 3000+
2. Upvotes – 1000+
3. Signups – 50
   
   

What are the biggest challenges you faced while launching on the product hunt?

Our biggest challenge was keeping our outreach strategy discipline everyday of every week until the launch. Keeping a common tracker ensured multiple people didn’t reach out to the same user. Our tracker ensured we kept separate lists of our network contacts vs new connections.

What are 3 pieces of advice you would give to creators who’s launching on a product hunt?

1. Launch before you actually launch: Our 2 previous free product launches on product hunt gave us many insights & helped us build a great notify list of 900+ for moda.
2. Guesstimate your Upvote strategy: We were aiming for 1000 upvotes on launch day, and almost achieved it. This was only possible because we had simulated & planned how upvotes would come from different sources 6 weeks prior to launch, and then figured our outreach velocity.
3. Launch day hourly plan: Plan ahead how each hour is going to look like, from Upvote counts, to what exactly different folks in the team will be focusing on. Also, keep an eye out on potential competitors on launch day, by keeping an eye on the size of their notify me list.

Bonus: Think twice before sponsoring for paid groups or sponsored content. Our Moda launch was 100% clean, and we had spent 0$ on the launch. We did observe other products doing paid promotions though. Product Hunt is generally very strict about gaming the system, if a sudden uptick of votes come in, you can be flagged.

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

Checkout Moda for more details.