What it's like to be listed on Product Hunt, twice
peteroome.com
peteroome.com
We were featured on PH and while it does indeed drive a lot of traffic, the quality of it is about the same as from StumbleUpon's paid discovery, i.e. near zero. They come, they see, they bounce. No conversion at all.
As Peter pointed out, it really depends on the product. Founders have reported as little as 0.5% conversion to as high as 40% conversion from page view to purchase via PH.
I also look at things like PH, HN and Reddit as tests of my product. I had a post about a new feature make the front page of Hacker News, the product is a Swift programming resource and I had 8500 views within 5-10 hours. After that, the shark fin died out and I'm back to nearly where I started. That tells me that I haven't quite figured it out.
An interesting difference (just observing my own behavior) is that every new feature I release, I submit to HN. But, I am waiting until a certain point to submit something to PH. I think it is because of Product Hunt's focus on Product that makes we want to only show things that are more "ready for primetime" .
I might be fooling myself, but I feel that the probability of meeting people interested in joining my cause in one way or another on PH is much higher than on HN. Obviously, that's just what my brain has decided on its own, no data to back that up.
And even if you do think PH is your target market, you can learn something useful from a shark fin. You're getting feedback from an abnormally insightful group of people, which is both good and bad. Bad, because the feedback isn't necessarily market-generalizable. Good, because the depth you'll get is better than what you'd get from a test group plucked at random from the general population.
In any event, getting featured on PH shouldn't be the beginning and end of one's marketing plan. And Peter is pretty careful to point that out.
I'd imagine that conversion looks better for products whose intended target falls more in line with the PH crowd. (See Ryan's comment re: 40%. My guess is that products on that end of the spectrum were right in the wheelhouse for this community.) So the operative lesson here is to understand the PH userbase, and to put that userbase into context within one's broader marketing strategy.
I don't know why I didn't make more of the conversion rate. I might have to edit the post and add some slightly more insightful data to this.
Another view (a far more accurate view) is that it is a spin-off from Hacker News with a more focused topic. I quite enjoy the site, and I've never posted anything on it. Non-technical people and product focused people can find a lot of the stuff on HN outside of their interests where product hunt hits much closer to the bullseye, more consistently.
I just wanted to clarify that Product Hunt does not appear to be an organically created phenomenon, but a very engineered process that from the looks of things was very well executed.
I could also be completely wrong.