The Product Hunt Effect — One Week On

It’s hard to believe that just less than 24 hours before being featured on Product Hunt my co-founder and I considered reassessing the plan for our site. We were not having much luck so far but walking home on a stormy Edinburgh night, after being soaked to the skin by a crazy driver and huge puddle, we joked that maybe this will be the end of our bad ‘luck’.

And we were right! I was awakened at 4:30am by the sound of my phone lightly buzzing — our site ‘Webfolio’ had been submitted on Product Hunt by @erictwillis (thanks again). Not only were we featured but we remained on top for a huge portion of the day and ended up with over 200 upvotes (currently 258), which was not only surprising but it made us reaffirm our belief in our product.

We could not believe it, for most of the morning and afternoon we were at the top!

The results

The whirlwind of Product Hunt brought us 3,600 visitors and 450 signups over 48 hours, meaning we had a conversion rate of 12.5%. Our phones were well and truly bouncing with all of the notifications and emails. Since being featured, the number of signups has continued to grow consistently. We were very excited at the number of tweets and retweets that Webfolio also received and really loved that developers recognised the benefits of Webfolio.

The Product Hunt traffic spike, but the curve is now starting to grow steadily.

Why did we make Webfolio?

The idea for Webfolio came about when I was applying for a job and as a developer I often find it difficult to present my code, mainly because most of it is in private repositories, so simply linking potential employers to my Github account is almost futile.

Also and perhaps more important for me, is that fact that I do not have a Computer Science degree or a degree of any kind. I am a self-taught programmer like many others and so needed something extra to send along with my cv, as we can sometimes be automatically overlooked.

I felt that if I needed something like this, surely there are other developers looking for it too? Fast forward just a few months and Webfolio was finally created.

Other sites

Due to Product Hunt’s popularity and undeniable authority in the startup world, Webfolio was also featured on other sites. This again was a welcome surprise and drove even more traffic, particularly from Hackpedia.

It is crazy the snowball effect that Product Hunt can have. We received many emails from various startups and people looking to work with us, which again as a startup is just fantastic.

We love Product Hunt!

It was amazing to us that we started from a small idea, not sure whether people would ever sign up, to have reached an audience worldwide with such a positive response.

We are truly delighted that Product Hunt had given us the opportunity to reach so many developers and to really kickstart our journey. We want to thank the Product Hunt community for really getting behind Webfolio and for your wonderful support.

If you want to get in touch, send us an email at info@webfol.io or tweet us @russellbarnard @creeshla or @_webfolio

You can also find out more about Webfolio here https://webfol.io