Launching a digital product is just as hard as building one. If not harder.
At Dentro, we aim to create systems around building, launching and running digital products.
We are nowhere close to perfect – yet 😉 – and in this article we’ll show a transparent deep-dive into our digital product launch experience of our latest product NoteThisDown. Including everything that worked, and everything that didn’t. And of course our learnings and what we’re going to do differently next time.
We recommend reading it all as context matters, but if you’re particularly interested in a certain part, here’s the content overview:
Preparing a digital product launch
We are going to start things of with a bit of context. Out of hundreds of ideas in our virtual drawer, we decided on build NoteThisDown. Mainly because we felt like there might be a need and we could build something that actually helps a few people. We do not do user research beforehand and rather jump straight into designing and building.
Product
NoteThisDown is an application that lets users transcribe handwritten notes and store them to a new page in their Notion account. The target group is basically anyone who likes to take their notes by hand, but struggles with digitizing them, as obviously retyping everything is not really an option.
It’s supposed to be super simply:
- Sign in with Notion and select where in your account you’d like new pages to be saved
- Take a photo or upload one from camera roll (multiple photos at once also possible)
- Enter a title for the new page
- Start the transcription with the click of a button
- Transcription of handwriting plus the original photos are saved to a new page in Notion
NoteThisDown is a PWA (progressive web app), which basically means it is a website that can be placed on the homescreen of any mobile device and accessed like any other application.
Users getting started with NoteThisDown first sign in with their Notion account credentials. After that, they see a paywall from which they can select either a monthly or yearly subscription. Either option comes with a 7 days free trial. They will then need to enter their credit card details (which we process via Stripe) and once done they’re ready to go.
Pricing
NoteThisDown is the first app we’ve ever launched that comes with a paywall. We used Stripe as a payment provider, which worked relatively well.
There’s just two types of subscriptions: monthly and yearly.
In terms of $$$ we were unsure. Frankly, finding the right price points for a new product is a science for itself 🤯
Eventually, as for us this launch was a test to validate the idea mainly, we decided not to overthink it and go with this:
- Monthly: 8 USD
- Yearly: 79 USD
In addition to that, we offered Product Hunt users a coupon code that gives them 37% off. More on how that was received later.
Landing page
Some while ago we built our own template in WordPress which we’re adapting and extending over time. This is what we used for the NoteThisDown landing page as well. It’s a one pager that aims to provide all relevant information required for prospective users. All CTAs lead to the application itself.
You can see it here: NoteThisDown landing page
Launching NoteThisDown
Product Hunt
Seems like everyone launches on Product Hunt, and so do we 😅
For those who never heard of the platform: Product Hunt allows you to list your product and enter it in a daily competition with lots (100+) of other products. Users upvote their favorites, which then determines a ranking. The higher you rank, the higher your visibility.
There’s a lot of myths and strategies around launching on Product Hunt. People seem to build up complete campaigns around their launches, mobilizing via their social media networks and other places for weeks in advance.
That’s not really us and frankly we don’t have the time to do it. So we simply prepared a nice looking launch page and scheduled it to be published on the next possible day (which happened to be a public holiday in many European countries, oops 😅). In total we spent maybe two hours on it, mainly preparing a few nice looking screenshots to attract some attention.
And then it’s simply reacting to comments on the actual launch day, of which it feels like 90% are written by AI bots – but hey, a compliment by a robot doesn’t hurt either!
Other platforms
On the day our Product Hunt launch went live, we also published posts on Linkedin and X.
Haven’t done much more on this end. And definitely nothing in the paid sector.
Results after 4 weeks in
Now it’s time for the juicy stats you’ve been looking for! Let’s break them down one by one and dive into the actual numbers we’ve collected over the last 4 weeks.
Product Hunt
Feedback on Product Hunt was way better than we’d expected. 150 upvotes, 30+ comments and day rank #6 meant quite high visibility, at least for our standards. We’ve only had two launches on Product Hunt prior to this, of which one landed at 6 upvotes and day rank #110 and the other at 110 and #15.
The funny thing is, we didn’t do anything different this time, but performance of NoteThisDown was better. We are still not entirely sure what makes or breaks a launch on Product Hunt, as the criteria which products land on the featured list seems to be a bit arbitrary and not entirely determined by number of upvotes.
Somehow feels like it’s a combination of how much users like the product and how much the Product Hunt team likes the product. And probably quite a bit of luck as well.
For us this means: we won’t do anything different in future launches, as it does not seem to be worth the effort. We will continue to treat Product Hunt as a listing bot basically.
Website Analytics
This is where it gets interesting. We’re only tracking visits on the landing page and not the app itself.
At first, we saw increased traffic from Product Hunt, which made total sense and was what we’d expect. Very high on launch day, then decreasing sharply.
On day 3 though, some other websites started to pick up NoteThisDown. The biggest of which: the Rundown AI, a newsletter about AI, send to nearly a million subscribers. Which quickly surpassed Product Hunt and became our top source for landing page visitors.
In total we had 1,997 unique visitors on the landing page in the first 4 weeks after the launch. With 43% coming from the therundown.ai and another 26% from Product Hunt.
We also very quickly saw visits coming from Google, although low in absolute numbers. Thanks to Product Hunt, several other publications picked up NoteThisDown and drove additional visits to our landing page.
Out of all 1,997 unique visitors, a total of 216 or 10,9% clicked a CTA, which all led to the app itself.
And out of those 216, a total of 94 users signed in with their Notion account.
Sales
Yes, we actually made sales. Plural that is 😁
Out of the 94 users who logged in with their Notion account, a total of 22 put down their credit card infos and subscribed for a free 7 days NoteThisDown trial. 20 monthly subscriptions and 2 yearly ones.
Quite a few people cancelled during the trial period and a few payments didn’t go through, but 7 users started a paid subscription after their trials ended 🎉
Conclusion
So, what have we learned?
- Product Hunt is basically an efficient listing bot. You launch your product, get visibility and other websites will feature you and link to your landing page. Which means we’ll continue to use PH, but not put too much effort into building the campaign itself.
- Don’t overthink, rather launch and see what happens. We were pretty unsure whether NoteThisDown would be “ready” to be published, but decided to launch nevertheless. Best decision! Not only did we learn that it’s actually ready and people are willing to pay for it already, but in addition to that we have a validated business case we can now build upon.
- Discounts on Product Hunt seem irrelevant. Or at least for us they were, as nearly no one actually used the coupon we provided.
- We had no idea about sending automated emails. For whatever reason, we haven’t thought about this prior launching. Now we did our research though and will definitely integrate this in our product stack.
- Interacting with (potential) customers should be an integral part of the process. We completely neglected this tbh. We plan to include reaching out to very early users in our process from now. As personal and individual as possible in order to get our hands on every bit of feedback they might have for us.
Now we got a bit more experience along with a validated idea and very raw product.
We’ll continue to improve NoteThisDown and build new products as well.
Thanks for reading
✍️ Try NoteThisDown: note-this-down.com (use code NOTEHUNTERS37 for 37% off)
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📩 Work with us: office@dentroai.com