Gal Ringel, CEO of Mine, shares how his team planned a Product Hunt launch months in advance to hit number one and reach 200,000 users. They researched with consumer experts, built early-tester networks, created launch assets, and timed it to avoid competing releases. The top spot on Product Hunt proved crucial for the initial momentum Mine needed.
Take me through that. Was that always your plan to launch on Product Hunt? Did you— what other channels were you launching on and how did you kind of fuel that growth for other people who wanna use Product Hunt as a channel potentially for customers?
So we were definitely planned to do a Product Hunt launch. So it's funny because, you know, I'm coming from a strong tech background. I'm not an expert in consumer product and this company, mine, is the first consumer company that I'm building. Although as an investor, I did invest in consumer companies, but I didn't actually, you know, was part of the in and out of a consumer company. So we did huge research internally on how you should launch your product. So we were speaking with a lot of experts in big consumer companies in the Valley, in New York, in Europe, and we tried to learn how to do that right. And everyone said that one of the biggest things that you should do as a consumer product, if you value yourself, is to launch on Product Hunt. But if you launch on Product Hunt, you have to bet on everything. I mean, you have to get the first place because if you wanna get the right exposure from Product Hunt, if you're not getting the first place, it doesn't really worth it. In terms of the Product Hunt, we were planning that, I think, 3 months ahead. And we were also writing a blog about it on our website. Sameind.com. If you go to our blog, you can see a piece of all the campaign that we did step after step and all the things that worked for us. So we wanted to give back to the community. But in that sense, we prepared the content in advance. We built the network in advance of people that would be early testers and start using Mine in advance. We built all the assets. We found the right hunter. We chose the right date. I mean, you have to make sure that you wouldn't compete with tech, big tech companies that are doing a big launch, right? Because you want to get all the exposure to yourself. So there are a lot of bits and bytes, but I can say that for us, Product Hunt was a huge, huge jump for the product.
With that, how did that fuel the growth afterwards? And how did you have to adapt after doing that? Because I talked to some people who have done that, and it can be a huge bump, but then just goes back to nothing. Not zero, but very little. And it's like managing that and taking advantage of that while you have it. How did you look at that after the fact, after you did the Product Hunt launch?
Obviously, you can think about Product Hunt as a PR effort, right? It's a big spike and then it goes down. But then it really depends, to your question, what other efforts or what other marketing activities you are doing in parallel, right? So as a company, we knew that we wanna build our growth Organically. So we didn't want to be the companies that, you know, pour a lot of money on performance marketing and spend a lot of money on that to acquire users. We want to prove that we can grow organically, and this is what we did. So just to mention the metrics again, so in just 12 months since we launched our product, we got to 200,000 users, and almost 90% of that growth was completely organically. So the marketing activities that we did was a lot of thought leadership. So we wanted to build a brand which is trustworthy. We wanted to build a brand which has brand authority in the data privacy space. So for doing that, we had to do a lot of content, thought leadership, SEO, media relations. We are working with a lot of reporters and we give them insights about different industries and what data is being collected there. We recently launched our real-time privacy index. So you can start seeing in real time how companies are dealing with privacy requests, what data they collect. So you can get some sort of information about companies. So what I'm trying to say is that we are trying to put a lot of efforts on growth hacking and organic growth to fuel our growth. And by the way, something that happened to us, which is really unique, is word of mouth. I think that's something that is really sticky with our product is that A lot of people are curious to know what is the number of companies that have their data, right? It's crazy to know that you have 400. Personally, I had over 800 in my footprint. Yeah, it's a lot. So the curiosity plays a really nice driver here, and somehow mine got carried word of mouth to many other geographies. So today we have users from Canada, Australia, India, Japan. South America, Central America, a lot of places that we haven't done any marketing activity. That's what works, uh, worked for us.
