How Erase.bg became #2 product of the day on Product Hunt

In October’21 Erase.bg made a big splash on the international product listing portal, product hunt.

Securing top positions in all categories i.e product of the day, week & month. We gained massive visibility which resulted in more than 6x increase in erase.bg web traffic and 9x increase in the images processed.

The road to product hunt success had its fair share of blocks & bumps. We made a few mistakes then spoke to the right people, strategized, and finally pulled it off!

What is Product Hunt?

Product Hunt is a platform to geek out on amazing tech products that surface on the internet on a daily basis. It’s where all the tech enthusiasts gather to be the first to try out interesting internet products and share them with the rest of the world.

A lot of amazing products such as Houseparty, Robinhood, Periscope, etc. have had successful launches on Product Hunt and got a great head start.

Erase.bg Goals:

Our goal with Product Hunt was to get in front of a large global audience. Although we were really hoping to make it to the top 5 products of the day, we had no way to know how the audience would receive us. Getting at least into the top 15 products of the day was a non-negotiable because otherwise, your product isn’t even searchable on Product Hunt.

How to have a successful launch on Product Hunt?

There are a few things you need in order to have a successful launch on Product Hunt:

• A great product
• An honest story about the journey of this product, and why it was really made
• Beautiful graphics for your listing
• Eye-catching icon (possibly a GIF that demonstrates the use of the product)
• An interesting product video explaining what your product does in as little time as possible
• A lot of people supporting your product on the launch day
• Comments and upvotes from influential Product Hunt users throughout the day
• High velocity of upvotes in the initial few hours of the launch from genuine PH users

Before the launch:

Earlier, Erase.bg had a lot of things that users could do. Erasing background, adding different colors to the background, resizing the images, erasing certain sections of the image, etc.

However, user behavior on the website suggested that most people who visited our website just wanted to do 1 thing — Erase the background from their images.

And thus started our journey to get rid of all the clutter and make it easier for the user to get a transparent background on their images.

Once we had achieved this, we decided to launch Erase.bg on 20th October’21 which also happened to be the Anniversary of Fynd.

There were a whole bunch of things that we needed to do before the launch. Getting the product ready, finding influential PH users within our 200+ people company, introducing PH to the rest of the company so that we can have more genuine users to support us during our launch day. We started doing this almost a month before the launch day.

Pre-launch Blunders

I had never done a Product Hunt launch myself. I wanted to do a dry run and see how the process is and what all assets will be needed. In doing so, I had scheduled the launch at a random date (6th October) and then I forgot about it.

Naturally, our product went out in the open 2 weeks ahead of the schedule when it wasn’t even completely ready.

Thankfully, the community managers of Product Hunt were kind enough to help us out with this when I explained the whole matter to them. They deleted our listing so we could launch it again on the correct date.

Huge shoutout to Aditya!

1 Week Before Launch

This was the time to get our whole company excited about the launch. We knew everyone who was an active PH user in the company and told them about what we expected from this launch. They were all as excited!

We had all the assets ready: Our story, an amazing video, an eye-catching GIF as the icon, and of course an impeccable product that we had perfected over the last couple of years.

This is what set us apart from the competition: Erase.bg is completely free to use

We let users download unlimited high-resolution images (up to 5000x5000 px which covers most of the modern images) for free without any credit card or even asking for a sign-up.

Imagine having a free world-class AI tool in your pocket that removes the background from your images within seconds.

The Launch Day!

We moved our launch day from 20th to 21st for some last-minute changes. We decided to launch it at 1:30 PM IST, this is when a new day begins in the PST timezone that PH follows.

This would give us a good 24-hour window to get in front of as many people as possible.

When I hit the launch button, I was as excited as I was nervous. The team had worked so many sleepless nights to perfect the product to this point. It had to work.

Everyone in the team was so excited that they kept sharing it with their friends across the internet. It helped with the initial momentum. We were already the #1 product within the first hour.

Once that happened, we started receiving upvotes and comments from complete strangers on the internet. The momentum lasted till 12:30 AM IST, after that, we moved to the #2 position when ODX startups launched their product.

I remember staying up till 3 AM IST that night and getting texts from other team members who were also as excited as I was.

What I did to make sure we can keep the momentum going:

• Reply to all the comments throughout the day
• Send a thank-you tweet to as many people as we can, who upvoted for our product
• Update my bio with “Erase.bg (#2 Product of the Week) 🚀” and then engage with influential PH users

I also wrote a tweet to Ryan Hoover (Founder of Product Hunt) to share my gratitude about how Aditya helped us with the launch and how it would have been impossible without his help to launch properly on the intended date. To my surprise, he responded to this tweet and his comment gave us a lot of visibility.

What I deliberately avoided:

• Asking people to upvote our product (not even people from our team) — I always asked people to use our product and leave feedback on what they would want to change about the product

Post-launch ~ Success & Gratitude

Finally, we ended up becoming #2 product of the day on 21st October’21, #2 Product of the week, and #5 Product of the Month (October 2021).

It feels so great to be able to flaunt these badges on our website. We got over 1200 upvotes from a lot of PH users including some of the influential users like:

• Blake Emal (CMO at Copy.ai)
• Hunter Walk (Seed stage VC)
• Julie Chabin (Head of Product Design at Product Hunt)
• Darshan Gajara (Head of Design at GraphCMS)
• Csaba Kissi (Serial Product Maker)
• Sharath Kuruganty (Community Programs Manager at Product Hunt)

And many more!

The Launch Impact

Within the first week of the launch, we saw over 6x increase in the website traffic, over 9x increase in the total number of images processed, and got featured in the weekly newsletter of Product Hunt.

Additionally, we had a bunch of enterprise clients reach out to us for specific services which helped boost our revenues.

More than anything, it felt so great to see our product help so many people across the world — nothing beats that!