Product Hunt

So yesterday I woke up to a few new Tend users in my Inbox. This is unusual for a Sunday morning, so of course I go take a look at Tend to see where they’re coming from. Tend showed me that they are coming from a site called ProductHunt.com.

So of course I jump on Product Hunt to see us listed on their home page!

Come to find out, Tom Masiero posted Tend to the Product Hunt after seeing a tweet by @earthlingworks.

24 Hours later, we received about 50 new users, and 1,600 visitors from Product Hunt.

Getting listed on sites like Product Hunt, TechCrunch and other platforms can be a nice boost of new users for a startup. Days like yesterday are super exciting and encouraging. However, initial success like this can be very misleading. It’s so common, that Paul Graham came up with the startup curve that actually shows the “TechCrunch of Initiation” as the initial boost of a product. Shortly followed by the “Trough of Sorrow.”

The reason that the curve looses moment, is because getting the initial publicity draws a lot of “tire kickers” into your app. People get excited, try out the product just because (they may not have any real need for it), and they eventually churn out. Beyond that, you can’t scale publicity in a predictable way. These factors leads to the “wearing off of novelty.”

So although days like this can be super exciting, we’ve got a lot of work to do to actually create some predictable, scalable growth.