YesGraph is just getting started with our growth focused API. We announced our seed round on TechCrunch, then opened up our closed beta on Product Hunt. More recently, we had a few blog posts on front page of Hacker News.
Because we’re so young, it is really easy to differentiate traffic and impact. When you get a big spike, you know where it came from.
This means that we can compare the stats from those different sources, and also the downstream behavior.
When we announced on TechCrunch, we weren’t open for signup. So as a proxy, we are showing subscription to our waiting list. For Product Hunt and Hacker News, those are actual signups.
We’re showing total number of signups and visitors, not breaking out the source. So when we hit our mailing list that you could sign up, lots of conversions probably came from there.
We have a developer facing product. That means companies integrate our API into their products. As a result, it isn’t like a signup is what we really care about. We care about apps live in production. The eventual conversion rate isn’t obvious because that takes time to accumulate. So we’re not showing those numbers.
TechCrunch
- Story link
- Date: February 27, 2015
- Uniques: 2,281
- Mailing list signups: 369
- Conversion rate to mailing list: 16.2%
Product Hunt:
- Post link
- Date: March 25, 2015
- Uniques to PH specific landing page: 4,767
- Total uniques: 9,081
- Votes: 376
- Mailing list subscribers receiving announcement: 6,237
- Opens on announcement email: 2,511 (40.3%)
- Clicks on announcement email: 470 (7.5%)
- Signups: 705
- Conversion rate to signup: 7.8%
Hacker News:
- Store your own analytics data:
- April 21, 2015, 18 votes, 935 uniques
- The Math of YC Dilution,
- April 22, 2015, 30 votes, 2,492 uniques
- What Changed at YC from W08 to W15,
- April 23, 2015, 72 votes, 5,874 uniques
- Uniques to home page: 1,855
- Signups: 44
- Conversion rate: 2.8%
So what can we conclude from the numbers? The conversion numbers are a little off. It is easier to signup for a mailing list than for a service. Also my blog posts brought some traffic but it didn’t convert well. The post about analytics actually converted traffic to signup much better than the posts about Y Combinator.
We also see the relationship between Hacker News votes and traffic. The visits per vote go up with more votes.
The elephant in the room is that Product Hunt sends a hell of a lot more traffic than TechCrunch. I think the reason is that there are lots of TechCrunch stories that split attention, but we were in the top 5 on Product Hunt for the whole day. TechCrunch has a larger audience for now, but Product Hunt’s audience likes to get out and try things.
Overall, you should borrow these numbers if you’re trying to estimate impact of a press launch. Each of these bits are successful. It’s great to be featured in TechCrunch, we were at the top of Product Hunt, and we’ve had multiple front page of Hacker News blog posts.
I often see people have unreasonable expectations around what getting each of these produce. The best is to focus on building a great product and take a measured approach to getting publicity. It isn’t a silver bullet, because silver bullets don’t exist.
Subscribe to get future YesGraph posts here.