After reading the Product Hunt Manual by Kiki Schirr I felt pretty confident in our approach to running a Product Hunt campaign. We decided to launch Backa on a Friday after some advice on Maker Hunt via Eric Willis. Seeing as its so competitive early in the week, with the likes of Eric Ries and Sacha Greif hanging around.
Backa wasn’t even really ready…
After so much discussion about how we can improve what we already have, we opened up a Slack channel and began to speak with our users. They have been amazing and have come up with some great ideas. We are still inviting people to a part of the community, so if you’re interested, click here.
The problem we were facing was time, what with work commitments and family. Implementing any of these new ideas and ideas we already had was impossible, and so even though Backa wasn’t even really ready, we launched it to the masses.
So what is Backa?
Backa is a platform to help founders gain valuable, actionable feedback for their startup ideas. Submit an idea or an existing one you need help improving and the Backa community will answer any questions, upvote and downvote your posts in the hope you can gain a consensus.
Ever had an idea that you just have no idea where to begin? So have we.
Post, discuss, build and launch your ideas easily with the support of others.
Our analytics and insights will be our secret sauce (In the works). With Twitter sentiment analysis (amongst others) we will be able to show you what is being said about your idea in an easy-to-read dashboard that will let you take action from the feedback.
Who is Backa?
You may have already read this post, but if not, we were three guys who met on #Startup, had the same idea, and just clicked immediately. We worked together and after much discussion came up with this platform.
Unfortunately due to success in other areas, Ben decided to leave the Backa team.
So for now, its me (Daniel Kempe) and Daniel van der Merwe.
Me (Daniel Kempe), i’m the Creative Design Director at Infinite Visions and Daniel is a Developer and founder at Rokkit200.
We consistenly talk about how we can improve the Backa community, to get people engaging in ideas to hopefully add value and maybe even collaborate.
We are also on the lookout for another developer who has the same passion we do and is interested in working alongside us on Backa. Get in touch if thats you.
Back to the launch!
So it was around 1230pm when Backa went live on Product Hunt. Immediately a small surge of traffic headed our way and suddenly the excitement grows when you see people voting on your product.
Now we’re sharing every which way we can to hopefully increase our upvote count. One thing I love most about it though is seeing people comment, and we had one from the man Ryan Hoover himself with very insightful feedback…
“The usefulness and success of BACKA 100% depends on the community culture and expertise of the people on the site*. How are you building the community and facilitating quality discussion, @danielkempe?
*I use an asterisk to emphasize that the people that provide feedback may not be the customer for one’s idea and it’s also important to recognize that crazy ideas that many people think won’t work, are also worth exploring.”
Very valid points there I think you’ll agree and obviously one we’ve already thought about when we were disussing the idea right at the beginning. Like Product Hunt, our main audience is founders of startups, so at the moment, Backa is for founders helping founders, and although individual ideas may not match individuals, using Backa to gain a concensus on ideas would still be very useful.
Another point he hits on is the community. We are working so hard to build up a helpful community, which is no mean feat. Getting people to engage is the hardest part and so we’re focusing on this.
Anyway, by this time, we’re at #3 on Product Hunt and all is going well. 84 people are currently on the site and we’re getting at least 1 signup per minute. People are posting ideas, and the discussion begins.
We hit #2 on Product Hunt and traffic is always on the rise. Seriously exciting times when you receive such positive comments. Our main goal is to stay in the top ten so we’d feature in the Product Hunt email newsletter.
As per the manual, we consistently shared Backa on Twitter #startup Facebook Linkedin #freelance etc…throughout the day but always stating that only if you like the idea, upvote!
By the end of Friday, we dropped to #3 again after a late surge from PH Trend (which I upvoted for by the way). Even now, after 4 days we are still benefiting from the Product Hunt feature, so massive appreciation goes out to them.
Statistics
So what happens when you finish #3 on Product Hunt?
827 people have signed up for Backa in the past few days. 40,625 page views later, 116 ideas have been posted and 341 comments have been made.
As I said before in this post, we need to improve our engagement rate, so thats what we’re concentrating on now, but its something we’ll always look at improving in the future too.
So what’s next?
We are always speaking to our users via our Backa Slack channel (would be awesome to see you there), so we’ll listen to our core users to help mould Backa into something that would be beneficial to all.
After reading the Brick By Brick guide by Sacha Greif, we’ve got so many new ideas to help build what we are all looking for.
Let’s help each other build better startups.
We’re currently working on building out social sharing, some analytics and sentiment analysis ideas so look out for them in the coming months, but for now, lets help each other build better startups because we all share the same common goal, success.
Thanks again to Product Hunt, the Product Hunt Manual, #Startup #freelance and Maker Hunt for helping us make this happen.
Conclusion
Get yourself on Product Hunt :-)
