Duke: Product Hunt drives launch spikes but lacks long-tail traffic
Justin Duke · ButtonDown Email Is Niche Mailchimp, Hits $5k in MRR · Aug 23, 2020 · at 11:19
Justin Duke, founder of Buttondown, contrasts the short-lived burst of Product Hunt launches with the long-tail acquisition on discussion platforms like Hacker News.
0:00 / 0:27exact quote · 27.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Product hunt is much more friendly in terms of letting people kind of glom on and being very sort of positive, like the community there in general is nicer, but it's the opposite of a long tail, right? Like you're not going to be able to bring it up in a lot of discussions. I think the state of discourse and like the actual people commenting on product hunt is much more less in volume. It's really just that first day. If you can kind of get in the top five, then you're going to get a great spike of content. But it'll drop off pretty dramatically thereafter.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Justin Duke
Duke: Purely usage-based SaaS pricing drives superior expansion revenue and ARPU
“I think if I had to choose between the two, purely usage-based because it kind of leans into expansion revenue a bit more nicely. You're always going to have an upper bound if you do that conventional sort of like three-column SaaS pricing grid of 29 a month, …”
Duke: Hacker News launches are hit-or-miss 'lightning in a bottle'
“I think it's more lightning in a bottle. It's, there's been a plethora of people writing about, like, how to launch on all of these news platforms, and I do think a lot of it is very hit or miss. Like, sometimes you win the lottery.”
Duke: Engineers mistakenly assume they can build better software in a weekend
“One of the worst things an engineer can say to themselves is I bet I could build a better version of this in a weekend.”
Duke: Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign leave casual bloggers and creators underserved
“And especially for some of the very marketing-heavy tools like ActiveCampaign, like MailChimp, these are designed for folks who are sending out, you know, e-commerce blasts to potentially tens of thousands of users, and that's a very important vertical to hand…”
Duke: Months-old Hacker News comments drive substantial Buttondown traffic
“And I still see a large proportion of my traffic coming from, you know, comments that I've made months ago on Hacker News, as long as the content is relevant and the tool itself is put into the discussion.”
Duke: Two thirds of Buttondown revenue comes from flat SaaS tiers
“It's around two thirds comes from that flat SaaS revenue. The flat revenue is sort of the paywall for some of the premium features like custom domains, advanced analytics, that sort of thing. Whereas metered is purely based on volume. So only a third of button…”