Chirp. That’s how it began. A single, simple, chirp from my Tweetdeck. I was in the middle of a meeting in my office when the tweet came in and I glanced only half-interested while deep in conversation. When I read the tweet however everything else stopped.
@dbhurley FYI, you've been added as a maker of Mautic on @ProductHunt http://t.co/x80YherNqu h/t @jacqvon 🙌— Product Hunt (@ProductHunt) March 17, 2015
That was all it said. Added as a maker of Mautic. (Our open source marketing automation platform and community.) But I knew what this meant. I was very familiar with the twitter handle @ProductHunt. For those that don’t know what Product Hunt is here is a brief explanation. Product Hunt features a list of the best new products on the web. Every day the list is restarted. Throughout the day these items are voted on by the community and comments added. This social aspect allows trending of the most popular new items. For startups and early stage communities this is an incredible achievement and I was well aware of the power of Product Hunt. I’d even submitted Mautic in the past but had never heard anything back.
Happy St.Patrick's Day
Now, here on St. Patrick’s Day, I had just received notice that we’d been added. Things kicked into high gear almost immediately. I excused myself from the meeting I was in and quickly informed the rest of the Mautic community that we had been “hunted” as Product Hunt refers to the adding of a new item.
And as expected, traffic spiked. (See graph above) We watched - anxiously monitoring our web servers as they creaked under the sudden load increase. But though we may have been anxious we had a confidence because we had some great tools in place.
Some Of Our Tools
We were using a CDN for static assets (CloudFlare is amazing), we also have a secret weapon (not too secret). We use New Relic. We could monitor throughput, response times, CPU usage, memory usage, and errors in live time. This was incredibly helpful as there were moment when we were registering a dozen accounts a minute and we found a problem with simultaneous registrations. We were able to fix them incredibly quickly and notify those few affected users directly. Remember, first impressions are everything! Zendesk was also a great help in monitoring and responding to any specific questions or support issues.
Of course we had thoroughly tested and re-tested to ensure we could handle a traffic increase and traffic spikes (we knew we would be wildly popular once people began to hear about Mautic). But there’s nothing like the confidence that when things are actually exploding you are capable of dealing with the situations as they occur.
Helping Continue Momentum
We continued the buzz by promoting Mautic’s addition to the list through various social media posts. We had to work fast because although we were aware of Product Hunt and hoped to be featured we had to create the resources on-the-fly. We created a custom short URL, http://mau.tc/prod-hunt which would be easy to share (Thanks to Bitly.) And then very soon after the announcement we released this on our social media platforms:
But we didn’t stop there. We continued to share the good news to hopefully increase the visibility of our listing throughout the day. We updated all our social media platforms at the same time. Following some good advice we didn't stagger our announcements but posted everywhere.
Later we created a second social media announcement focused on the specialness of being listed on St. Patrick’s Day and later in the afternoon we released this graphic:
The response was tremendous. These social media posts helped to boost our presence and awareness of our placement on Product Hunt. As a result we saw an increase in upvotes on the site and our listing began to trend. Things continued to grow as a result and now, the day after we are still “above the fold” as we continue to trend into the second day on Product Hunt.
Conclusion
All in all the day was a thrilling and somewhat wild ride. We saw thousands and thousands of new users and an incredible response to Mautic. Just as we had all suspected, people are thrilled when they discover the power of free and open source marketing automation. My alert may have started with a single chirp from a single tweet, but it wasn’t long before the notifications were coming in so close together the sounds were overlapping.
If you have a startup or a young community then you may be aware of Product Hunt already. If not, you should be. If you are, take a look at some of the tips I shared above to help you capitalize on your listing and do everything you can to maximize your social sharing!
Happy hunting!
