We're launching UNUBO, our first product and are documenting it all, right here on Indie Hackers.
This is part 1.5 in our 5-part launch journey, where I’ll be writing in detail how we approached each part, plus results - good and bad.
Have you checked out the other parts of the series?
✅ Part 1: Product Hunt Upcoming (general intro)
➡️ Part 1.5: Product Hunt Upcoming (results)
Part 1.5
You're probably wondering: "Hey, there's 5 parts to this series, what's up with 1.5?". Well, part 1 was more of a general introduction post, so I chose to post the results separately, rather than constantly re-editing part 1.
What is Product Hunt Upcoming?
Upcoming is a recently launched feature, allowing you to have a pre-launch kind of landing page, hosted on Product Hunt - featuring a chat bot.
I was keen on getting access to this, as it's a great way to drum up interest before your big Product Hunt launch, especially as it's all within the same ecosystem.
How?
Not everyone has access to the Upcoming feature yet. As a prerequisite, I think it helps if you have the following (don’t quote me on this):
- Posting rights
- Are active in the community
- Beta features enabled (shows extra interest)
The second one you should be doing anyway on Product Hunt, but other than that, all I did was simply ask for access. I reached out to Nick Abouzeid who hooked me up.
Once I created the page in the editor and hit save, it was already active and accessible via a given link, which you're free to share and use. All of the subscriber info can be exported to CSV, for use in MailChimp or whatever - really useful.
Nobody knows about your Upcoming page unless you tell them about it. For now, the team needs to manually post your entry to the Upcoming feed. They let you know beforehand which date it's going to be.
Generating buzz
As you may or may not know, we were to be featured on Product Hunt Upcoming, on Tue 29 Aug. Scratch that, if you didn't already know this, read part 1, then come back.
I followed Nick's advice and tried to generate some buzz, so I tweeted this on the day, 9:30am Pacific Time:
On it's own it probably wouldn't have amounted to much as my following isn't that great, but then Product Hunt themselves retweeted it!
A retweet from an account with 280k followers performs well of course.
Results
In 4 days 52 people subscribed to UNUBO's Upcoming page. To me that means, that 52 people trusted us with their email address and said: "we're interested in what you're doing, show me more."
That's awesome! Could it have been more? Sure, but here's a few points on that:
- We're new, nobody really knows who we are - we're working on that!
- Our app isn't a viral worthy topic such as crypto currencies or AI bots for example
- It's only been 4 days
With the level of excitement I'm working with right now (I like to celebrate small victories), I would have been happy with 10.
In part 1 I mentioned that we set out to launch on 1 September. After having worked for some months on UNUBO, it was really good to work towards a date - gave us a certain kind of focus we didn't have before. That being said we need to push it back a bit.
We want to make sure, that we launch with something people truly find useful (and a product that feels finished), and we feel that we can achieve that by pushing the date back a little.
After some internal grumblings, our launch date on Product Hunt now is the 12 September. That way it also gives our Upcoming page an extra week to breathe.
All premature excitement aside this is just a small step. The actual Product Hunt launch is what this is leading up to, so look out for the next parts of our series.
Thanks for stopping by and reading or upvoting. Any questions for me? How about advice, is there something I'm missing when it comes to launching?
Is there something you're launching soon? Would love to hear from you in the comments.
I hang out on Twitter, come say "hi" 🖖🏾.