It really depends on what you are launching. I still think for certain products (esp if you are targeting builders/founders) you can get customers from there.
That being said, as OP says, an upvote != a customer.
But it's still valuable for marketing. Here's how I think about it:
1. their mailing list which goes out to .. 100s of thousands at the least. Your ICP may not use PH every day but if they work in startups, they are likely to have an account.
2. people google your product and find the product hunt listing. It's good SEO. PH ads actually have done well in getting ICP customers for us.
3. [most important] product hunt is an alternative to a press release. the traditional way to launch something is to pick a day, get press, then amplify the heck out of it across all channels. getting press as a small startup is hard and often outside your control. You can use Product Hunt as your "press release", then tell everyone about your launch-investors, friends, customers, ask them to share on LI/Twitter etc. You get people talking about it. This is where most of the value lives.
what OP is describing in their post is sales which is obviously a more direct way to hit your ICP. but marketing also has its place. especially in a world where your ICP is getting bombarded by sales reps, automated SDRs, etc
Former dbx employee here— they always wanted to do it but it is technically challenging to build a fully functional product here accounting for things like formatting/comments/etc. when you have such a large enterprise user base there are often trade offs - ship a basic prototype and risk customer confusion/complaints or invest lots of resources and draw away from other projects
This is such a non-argument. They could've easily just started with text-diffs, then photo diffs. And later do doc diffs. Perhaps with some disclaimers. Heck, they don't do that for their main product, so why would they even do that for such a product. It's probably in the terms somewhere.
The reason they're not doing it is because they want a piece of the productivity pie.
It is challenging, very much so, but it can can be done. I built a prototype for Word files based on Git (can also use the GitHub
API, so making it work with the Dropbox API should be doable). I implemented sort of a blame function as well: Jump to the previous version of a paragraph with just one click.
As OP said, it took a lot of effort to get the UI ok. Probably takes even more effort to create a great UI, but I guess Dropbox has some resources, right? Shameless plug: Landing page at https://julesdocs.com
If anyone is interested in pushing this forward, I'd love to hear from you (mail address on the landing page)!
They could have released it to personal accounts? At the rate they have embraced and catastrophically abandoned other vastly more fundamental features (packrat? Photos?) This seems far more easier to roll out slowly. Seems more like they've lost their way.
And I will never ever forgive y'all for what you did with mailbox! (Like seriously what did they do?)
> They could have released it to personal accounts?
Enterprise customers pay more money to have more features with checkboxes in the feature matrix. Telling them they don't get a feature because their needs are too complicated is a tough sell. (something, something, opens up opportunities for low-end disruption, something, something)
Google does it all the time with GSuite. I doubt customers want buggy features. Beta testing new functionality on your free/personal user accounts before rolling it out to larger business customers is pretty standard.
For sure - we're trying to be really thoughtful of maintaining the high quality community aspect. We're actually experimenting with student internships, and have a pilot with MIT for their January externship.
That being said, as OP says, an upvote != a customer.
But it's still valuable for marketing. Here's how I think about it:
1. their mailing list which goes out to .. 100s of thousands at the least. Your ICP may not use PH every day but if they work in startups, they are likely to have an account.
2. people google your product and find the product hunt listing. It's good SEO. PH ads actually have done well in getting ICP customers for us.
3. [most important] product hunt is an alternative to a press release. the traditional way to launch something is to pick a day, get press, then amplify the heck out of it across all channels. getting press as a small startup is hard and often outside your control. You can use Product Hunt as your "press release", then tell everyone about your launch-investors, friends, customers, ask them to share on LI/Twitter etc. You get people talking about it. This is where most of the value lives.
what OP is describing in their post is sales which is obviously a more direct way to hit your ICP. but marketing also has its place. especially in a world where your ICP is getting bombarded by sales reps, automated SDRs, etc