What is (was) your launch plan?
Wondering if any of you had a launch plan, a checklist or a general idea on how to start from nothing to initial traction?
I checked @amyhoy 12 weeks plan (from Year Of Hustle) and must say that while it is not necessarily a perfect fit for my product (it is not intended to be for a SaaS -- but still applies), it is an awesome start to create an evergreen onboarding process.
So, what plan are you following?
I'm doing sort of a slow, rolling launch for the Indie Hackers following feed. There will never be a moment where I can really say it "launched." Rather, it's a gradual process lasting months.
In a nutshell, my strategy is a combination of (1) seeding the feed with some useful initial content, and (2) increasingly exposing the useful parts of the feed to the existing IH audience via the website and newsletter. It's roughly the same thing I did with the forum back when I first built it, except now the newsletter and website have a lot more traffic, so theoretically it should be easier.
I'm also making lots of feature additions and UX tweaks as I go along. Just a few weeks ago I would've said the UX was "very crappy," but today I'd rate it as "average." And you can't even do basic things like attach images to your posts yet. So there's still a ways to go, but I didn't think it'd make sense to wait for perfection before launching.
There are also some internal things I have to do to make the feed work. For example, it's useless if you aren't following anyone, so I've been working on making it easy to follow people and getting it so new IH signups follow interesting people by default.
Quick heads up: I don't always (actually, I probably never) get notifications when someone comments on a post I make in the following feed.
'Likes', I am notified about. Comments, not so much.
Thanks, I'll look into it!
Interesting, thanks!
As you said, you have traffic :)
Do you remember your strategy/plan when launching IH? How did you build the audience around it?
I actually think this bootstrapping-using-your-own-customers strategy can work well even if you don't have tons of traffic. All you need is a little bit… just enough to get some basic usage of the new thing you're working on. If you have 10 users, you can probably get 3 or 4 of them using your new thing.
That said, for IH, I was starting with an audience of zero, so I cold emailed about 150 people to get my first batch of interviews. (Fewer than 50 replied, and only 10 did an interview.) These were also my first readers who gave me feedback, and I refined my interviews based on their feedback. So yeah, when you lack an audience, you can always put in the manual effort to build a tiny one, i.e. do things that don't scale.
When it was time to scale, my audience came from launching on Hacker News. I "knew" the launch would go well, because I built the site from the ground up to appeal to the HN audience. I think you should always keep your audience and distribution channel in mind when building your product, rather than having them be an afterthought. They will/should affect your product decisions.
I made sure to ask visitors to join my email list, and then I put a ton of effort into sending engaging emails, so that I could use my own userbase as a distribution channel in the future. That paid off about 3 weeks later when I launched the forum. By that time my mailing list was up to 1500 people. That was good enough that I could advertise on it and start getting some initial traction on the forum. I didn't have to put it on HN, etc. I eventually "launched" the forum on PH in January 2018, more than a year after I released it.
My favorite analogy is the climbing wall. It's impossible to just jump to the top from the ground. Rather, every small step you take gives the the extra height you need to make it easier to reach the next step.