Ask HN: How did you launch your product?

23 points by palakz 9 years ago | 15 comments

csallen 9 years ago |

I launched Indie Hackers (https://www.indiehackers.com) a few weeks ago on HN. To make the site, I worked with about 12 different founders to decide on formatting; come up with questions; and ultimately conduct, edit, and publish interviews.

I waited to post on a Thursday morning, partly because I didn't want to compete with tons of new stories on a Monday/Tuesday, and partly because I wanted to launch as early as possible and I knew the MVP was basically done.

I let the founders I worked with know I'd be posting on HN, and they were eager to jump in the thread and answer questions that people had about their companies. I think this made the thread a lot more engaging. I also think the interviews themselves really resonated with people on HN, because they have a very "Ask HN" feel to them.

The thread ended up being on the front page of HN for about 36 hours, and stayed in the top 1-3 spots for most of that, finishing with 971 upvotes. (link to HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425) I got about 100,000 pageviews on Thursday and 60,000 on Friday. Someone submitted it to ProductHunt on Sunday morning, where it stayed at #1 all day and got about 20,000 pageviews.

That was 3 weeks ago. Today the site has gotten 283,000 pageviews total. Daily traffic is around 2-3k pageviews (30-50x lower than it was on launch day). I've added a blog, more than doubled the number of interviews, and I'm working on adding a forum. I've also added two sponsors, from whom I've made about $600 total so far.

palakz 9 years ago | |

I came across Indie Hackers on PH few days back. Loving it and this was insightful. Thanks! :D

Guyag 9 years ago | |

Would love a RSS feed for the blog

csallen 9 years ago | | |

Yep, it's on the way! I've got a question for you, as someone who doesn't use RSS feeds personally. Does it matter to you whether or not the full content of the post is included in the feed? Also, what RSS reader do you use?

KajMagnus 9 years ago |

Launch failure story here.

I posted to Reddit and Hacker news about the software I had built, but this didn't attract much attention. Largely because the software wasn't so very usable to anyone — I had mostly built something that mainly I liked. Which I didn't realize at that time.

Then I wrote a blog post related to the software, and it got popular here at HN, and topped the HN list for a short while. Lots of visitors to the website, and a few (like 5? 10?) people signed up and started using my software.

But what I had built was hard to use, so the few people who tested it, quickly abandoned it. I had not done much usability testing, at that time, and didn't realize how important good UX design is (UX design = user experience design).

Eventually I shut down the startup company (it was just me), and got a job instead.

But I continued working with the same software, on my spare time. And redesigned everything. Now it's soon time to launch again :-) And this time I've hired usability testers and UX designers and asked them for help and feedback about how to make everything (the software & website) more UX friendly.

I hope this'll be helpful to someone :-) I.e. to ask UX designers about feedback, on both the website and software, before launching. I found the UX designers at a freelancer site. Some of them are really talented (from my point of view), whilst others might instead make things worse.

le-mark 9 years ago | |

I had a similar launch and lack of interest, plus people signed up, and never returned. Did you engage the users that did signup in any way? Did you get positive feedback while on hacker news that led you to believe the product is viable? How has you experience been with ux designers and testers been? Heck, do you have a blog I could read about this stuff? :)

My project got very little feedback, just kinda nothing but a lot of page views and about 35 signups out 3,000 page views over 3 months. No activity from those that did signup, very discouraging.

KajMagnus 9 years ago | | |

Hi, Do you have a link to your project? (I have a link to mine in my profile)

- I didn't engage the users that signed up in any way, no.

- On HackerNews and other places, I got mixed feedback. I think I a bit ignored the feedback that said that what I built wasn't so very user friendly.

- My experience with UX designers and testers have been good, or great. Some of them were not of much help, but that doesn't matter much — what matters is that _some_ of the freelancers were really talented (from my point of view). I hired perhaps 10 different freelancers, they charged between $5 and $35 per hour. Usually the a bit more expensive ones were better. I got the impression that the freelancers where doing their best and working fairly quickly. (The freelancer site has a time tracker that takes screenshots.)

- Usability testing: This works fairly well with almost anyone. They recorded screencasts with sound. Problems could be that the sound was a bit low. Or the video didn't work. Then instead they wrote something in text. — I think it makes sense to let both 1) experienced UX designers and 2) people with not much experience, test the software. Someone who didn't know anything about tech, was actually very helpful, because she made it easier for me to understand how to write so that also non-tech users understand.

- The biggest problem with usability testing, was that it takes rather long to watch the videos afterwards :- P If they spend 30 min recording, then it takes 30 mins for me to watch. Sometimes it's more time efficient with feedback in text + screenshots in a PDF/LibreOffice doc.

- No blog, but I've thought about writing a blog post entitled "Doing everything the wrong way" or something like that. (I did other mistakes too. Perhaps I still do :- P )

(sorry for the late reply, didn't notice the new comments here)

palakz 9 years ago | |

We learn from mistakes, don't we? Good luck for your launch. Keen to know what you're building. Looking forward to it. :D

KajMagnus 9 years ago | | |

Yes I hope so. I probably won't fail in the exact same way this time :-) You can find links to the stuff I'm building via my profile

(sorry for the late reply, didn't notice the new comments here until I noticed my HN karma points had changed)

stevesearer 9 years ago |

I launched Office Snapshots (https://officesnapshots.com) just over 9 years ago by telling a few friends, who then posted to twitter, who then posted to digg where it made the homepage several times.

Launching was much easier than the following 9 years spent creating and growing a real business out of what was essentially an internet curiosity.

mtmail 9 years ago |

We do geocoding using open data sources https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/ and launched the product at the annual OpenStreetMap conference. Many people from the industry approached us, some blog posts, nothing really customer focused. We were sponsors of the conference and now corporate members of the OpenStreetMap foundation. We're listed in a couple of API-related directories but never made an effort to get as many links out as possible. We skipped product hunt. Our blog is regularly featured on other OpenStreetMap related blogs http://blog.opencagedata.com/ It's a niche really, not many companies need geocoding at scale.

mapster 9 years ago | |

What was your pitch in the early days? Has the consumer changed or is this service part of another larger Sass?

adibalcan 9 years ago |

We launch online products (like https://feedcheck.co ) with very limited budget. So, our PR campaign contains:

submissions to many startups directories starting discussions on Facebook startup groups blogs articles