How did App Press become the highest upvoted app creation tool on Product Hunt? It took a serendipitous conversation will a fellow entrepreneur halfway around the world and several years of hard work. Plus our team is confident we had an ideal product that resonated with the Product Hunt audience of makers and builders. For those unfamiliar, Product Hunt is a website that surfaces the best new products. Product Hunt features 20-40 new products every day that are hand-picked by 2% of its users. The users are trusted individuals from top VC firms and Fortune 500 companies in the techsphere, including investors, founders and designers.
App Press serves the world of founders and designers. An app creation tool that is design-first and requires zero coding (think Photoshop meets Keynote). The inspiration comes from my work as an art director several years ago yearning to build iPad apps but unable to learn Objective C. The fundamental belief behind App Press is creativity at its essence requires the right tools. App Press strives to be the perfect toolbox for creating an app. This belief combined with our platform melds perfectly into any creative process and strikes a chord with the audience we consider searches Product Hunt regularly.
How did you get posted? A serendipitous conversation.
I was recently contacted by Paul Kemp with The App Guy podcast to do an interview. Paul is based out of the UK and hosts a thought provoking podcast for entrepreneurs wanting to learn about the world of app creation. Paul and I had a lively conversation about the pearls and triumphs of founding a startup and building apps (listen here). Paul was impressed by App Press and what our team had created. He decided to talk to some of his trusted friends to see what they thought about App Press. Paul is very generous and genuinely cares about helping entrepreneurs. Turns out someone in Paul’s network was intrigued enough with App Press and posted our company to Product Hunt.
When were you posted?
Our Product Hunt post went up April 30, 2015. What I believe propelled us up the daily upvote chart was the fact we were posted a couple hours after midnight EST. By morning eastern time,we already had 30+ upvotes and we were in the top 5 products for that day.
So what happened?
By 9am EST it was clear we were in for a very interesting day. Because App Press is a new product and still has some rough spots, we don’t yet provide a free trial via the web site. Interested users either pay for an account or fill out an inquiry form. Inquiries started to come in at a quick pace. How fast? We began to see one per minute just after 11am EST. One per minute! This pace continued for three hours. At the same time our web traffic exploded. Then Twitter started to ping with several mentions and retweets.
By 5pm EST we had done 50X our average daily sales inquires. Web traffic results were also amazing. A 2,600% increase in daily unique visitors and a 3,300% increase in daily pageviews. Both records for App Press’ website. As of May 6 we are still seeing high traffic come in and are still feeling the positive ripple effects of the Product Hunt post.
End of the day results and takeaways
We ended the day with over 500 upvotes. (As of May 9 we have 570)
This translated into the highest up-voted app creation tool to date on Product Hunt.
I’m proud to report our team responded like professionals to the crushing flow of traffic, questions and inquiries. The App Press team replied to every lead in less than 20 minutes. We were able to answer customers so quickly because we’ve been laying a foundation to manage rapid user growth. We’ve chosen CRM tools that help us scale and we’ve been vetting processes that let multiple people handle traffic spikes. Plus our team ethos focuses on a high level of customer engagement and satisfaction.
That satisfaction starts with the first interaction you have with our team. Any sales inquiry that left a phone number, I personally called and thanked them for reaching out to us. I made over 50 phone calls in two days. It was amazing to hear from so many excited designers, founders, business owners and entrepreneurs. What our team is most excited about is the demand for a solution like App Press. The response has been extremely positive.
But we know there is more work to be done. We are a young company trying to deliver on the promise of code-free app creation with a design first approach. A mission that will take many more months of hard work to truly deliver on. Product Hunt made a big difference for us. We are firm believers that Product Hunt is the quintessential megaphone to measure the power of your company’s message and gauge potential customers interest.
If you have any questions or want to speak with me directly about App Press or our experience on Product Hunt feel free to drop us a note.
