Hacker News, TechCrunch, or Product Hunt? What’s the best way to launch your startup?

Last week, we launched Front after 7 months of beta. To make it really official, we managed to be featured on 3 different channels: Hacker News, Tech Crunch, and Product Hunt. A week has passed now, and we took the time to analyze how each channels worked for us. And we want to share the results with you.

For each channel, we measured 4 metrics:

• The number of unique visitors on our website (during the 24 hours following the post)

• The number of signups (during the 24 hours following the post) – it”s the number of companies who signed up, not users.

• The number of qualified leads (for us a qualified lead is a company that adds a shared inbox and invites at least one teammate)

• The number of shares (Twitter mainly – still during the 24 hours following the post)

Since we have a 14-day free trial, we’re not able to measure the actual number of customers we got through the different channels yet but we’ll share those with you soon.

1. Hacker News

We posted on Hacker News a straightforward post. Here’s the impact it had.

• Number of unique visitors on our website: 6174 visitors

• Number of signups: 96 companies

• Number of qualified leads: 65 companies

• Number of shares: 89 mentions

2. TechCrunch

TechCrunch wrote this article [“Front is a shared inbox app that makes Email suck less”.](http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/front-is-a-shared-inbox-app-that-makes-email-suck-lessfront-is-a-shared-inbox-app-to-make-email-suck-less/)

Here are the numbers that came out of it.

• Number of unique visitors on our website: 2477 visitors

• Number of signups: 173 companies

• Number of qualified leads: 108 companies

• Number of shares: 107 mentions

3. Product Hunt

We posted the new [mobile version of Front](http://www.producthunt.com/posts/front-now-mobile) on Product Hunt and it got a bit more than 150 upvotes in the day. Here’s how those helped us with our numbers.

• Number of unique visitors on our website: 2574 visitors

• Number of sign ups: 80 companies

• Number of qualified leads: 55 companies

• Number of shares: 35 mentions

Takeaways

We found that the three channels were really successful for us but they each brought us something different.

Hacker News was great for bringing visitors on our website, with actually more than both other channels combined. It also brought us a few job applications!

TechCrunch brought us the most signups as well as the most qualified leads.

Product Hunt enabled us to connect with really great companies and investors.

All-in-all these 3 channels have brought us 349 new companies and 228 qualified leads over the couple of weeks.