How We Used SHIP SUPER PRO: Cases, insights, experience

Hey guys! A short backstory: we have developed the Hypnopedia app and for the first time decided to make ourselves known at ProductHunt, like many of you. We carefully studied the materials, tips and recommendations of experienced makers before the prerelease to find out the best scenario for moving forward, including services to use, etc. At a certain point, we decided to try out the paid pre-launch format using the SHIP service, which seemed to fit our goals very well. It’s probably not worth describing all its features, but we’ll briefly cover the ones we consider to be the most important: Landing page as a tool for community concentration within ProductHunt. This is essentially the core of the SHIP service. Even if you have your own website or Slack channel, landing at ProductHunt can be easily considered as an additional source of user acquisition. I mean, it is very unlikely that even a ProductHunt veteran will find your Twitter page, Slack, etc. without mentioning them here, on the portal itself. Therefore, creating an Upcoming Page = attracting active PH users. Efficiency is one of the main indicators of the page. Thus, the first thing that can help you in this matter is analytics. Perhaps I’m preaching to the choir here, but I hope some will find this information useful and interesting. Without having numbers of page views, actual conversions (clicks on links, as well as videos, screenshots and project subscriptions views) and also seeing the ratio of these numbers, it is almost impossible to evaluate efficiency of the page. Consequently, it is difficult to weigh how good you have prepared your materials and polished your product. It is worth highlighting A/B testing as part of analytics. This is a simple tool for verifying assumptions. A video or screenshots - which is better? Obviously, eyeball estimation is unrealistic in this case. But if you have two pages created, it is possible to find out. The A/B testing mechanism is about showing the first page to one group of users, while showing the second to another. For this purpose, the ratio of impressions is distributed equally between the options (50/50). Thus, the best page will be the one with the highest number of subscribers. Feedback form (A survey) - Contact your audience to identify your downsides. Trust me, everyone has them. The easiest way to find issues a user is facing is to ask him directly. By subscribing to your project a user is showing his interest. Do not let it fade! Communicate and let him feel that he is a part of the project. Messages, especially with such metrics as delivery, viewing, clicks, will help you. Promotion. Even if you have invented Twitter, until people know about it, your project will only please you. Therefore, a very valuable option within the paid subscription is displaying your page on the main page of ProductHunt, where the largest number of visitors is concentrated. If you have your own website, using Widget can help with converting a visitor into a PH subscriber, which is also a pretty good bonus. For an awkward squad like us, the declared opportunities looked very delicious, as in fact we were promised a complete marketing tool for $249/m. This may seem like a whole lot of money, but with the help of a paid service you can solve many tasks on the matter of attracting and working with the community at Product Hunt. And now we would like to share our personal experience with SHIP SUPER PRO: Landing page works well, barring the “500 errors” that occured in the middle / end of March 2020. The interface builder is quite simple, so most users won’t have problems with creating and populating the page with content. The only difficulty is a limited number of characters allowed to describe the product, which is 200. But again, it is rather the specifics of the resource itself. The declared “Analytics” function is just a functional word and has nothing to do with what we expected. In fact, we were given only the number of subscribers with the dates reference. In some cases, the marker of a subscriber's country appears on a beautiful world map. In our case, it was only once. As support explained, true analytics comes with the A/B testing option enabled. A/B testing. The truth is that we do see the allocation of subscribers between A and B options. We wanted to test the hypothesis which implies page option (B) with the screenshots and (A) - with a video. Unfortunately, we were not able to upload either video or screenshots to option B. We reported this to technical support, but haven’t received any help yet. So it turns out that at the moment, given the absence of a “competitor” page, option A is leading with 9 versus 0. It is simply impossible to add any points to the B option. Perhaps the option with the video is just better?:) Feedback form (A survey). Based on the main principles of “The Mom Test” book by Robert Fitzpatrick, we created our own questionnaire. According to our idea, the test results should have helped in the development. As a reward for participating in the survey, we decided to give away promo codes for a free month of using our application. Here we must give credit to Ship Survey, since if comparing it with such third-party services as Typeform, it is more convenient and performs better (in our subjective opinion). There are charts and detailed profiles viewer. You can also configure IF, ELSE logic. At the moment, we have configured automatic mailing to send out welcome messages with an attached survey to new subscribers. Statistics are there and working, if it can be attributed to a magical invisible pixel that reports on email deliveries and openings. It is possible to send emails by segments, for example, Maker, Product Hunt User, etc. There is also an option to send the user a dedicated URL for a real-time communication. Promotion is included in the package price. If judging by the fact that we sometimes see an Upcoming block on the Product Hunt main page we may assume that it works. Unfortunately, we have never seen our project in this block and cannot see the number of transitions to our page from this block to confirm anything, since there is simply no such option. Widget. It is hard to understand why developers could not implement it for mobile browsers. Therefore, we had to spend several hours fixing this annoying flaw by ourselves. Even though it is working now, finding out the number of users subscribed through a Widget is possible only if you independently subtract the results of a/b testing from the total number of page subscribers. Though we are not sure about this, but that’s all we have Conclusion: we sincerely believe that SHIP is extremely useful and cool as a promotion service. Despite the obvious shortcomings in the work of some functions, we consider the main problem is mediocre attention from PH to Upcoming projects. We understand that a small number of subscribers to our project is primarily associated with the product itself. However, the number of subscribers to other projects appearing in this section is not always impressive either. If talking about paid features, we have to say that the price of Super PRO does not justify itself. We will be very happy to receive comments and advice from experienced product hunters regarding interaction with the SHIP tool. Perhaps it is we who are doing something wrong? We would also like to know how newcomers got acquainted with the Upcoming section. Did you encounter the same problems as we did, especially within the scope of the paid package? P.S. Hold off on sending us to the technical support. We did contact them regularly. Sometimes it takes up to 3-5 days to receive a reply and even then managers refer to each other, promise to pass comments to the technicians and so on. While at the same time we cannot use 100% of the potential from features that were supposed to be included in the paid package.