We're launching UNUBO, our first product and are documenting it all, right here on Indie Hackers.
This is part 3 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 3: Hacker News
If Product Hunt brought us a stream of visitors, then Hacker News was a flood! I have to admit, Hacker News scared me a little. Its users are very technical, suspicious and critical - at least that’s what I had in my head. Turns out my experience was the opposite, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
Preparation
If I quote Pieter Levels (again), from his guide on launching Hoodmaps:
‘Hacker News’ vibe is distinctly sceptical, intellectual and highly allergic to marketing and getting sold to. “These 10 Growth Hack Tips Will Change Your Life” will NEVER work on HN.’
This pretty much mirrored what I assumed, so I tackled it whilst keeping the above in mind. Hacker News is very busy, so I was trying to come up with a headline, that would gain people's attention.
My target was to post to Show HN, where you get to show off the latest thing you made, receive feedback, get crucified, or even with luck, some praise.
Based on the technical nature of the crowd and some of my own research, I constructed some building blocks, of what I thought the headline should be:
<WHAT IT IS, i.e. dashboard> <WHAT IT DOES, tracks cost or whatever> <STACK>
So, in my case that would have been: ‘Show HN: A dashboard to track your subscription costs, made with UI Kit’.
That seemed a bit dry for me, and somehow just didn’t work. I spent ages searching Hacker News, to see what kind of words and headlines got the most upvotes.
Launch
After a few hours of coming up with nothing, I ended up just posting this out of frustration and impatience:
Show HN: Manage your cost of app subscriptions in one place
Simple and to the point. I got excited at my first upvote, and soon it was 4, then 10. At some point I was at the top of Show HN!
And then eventually made it to the front page!
24hr stats
- 10 hours on front page (highest ranking was 9)
- 6000 pageviews (visitors from 84 countries and 860 cities)
- More great feedback
- Requests
Another great launch indeed. Unfortunately I didn’t track how many signups came from Hacker News, but there were a few (was too busy in the comments).
It wasn't all roses however. There were some concerns regarding the access some of the APIs were asking for. People were especially sensitive about this regarding GitHub, so it’s something we had to address and rectify (you’ll find this in the post).
What’s next
We still haven’t launched on Reddit. I’m taking my time, in learning how to approach the number 8 ranked website in the world.
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" 🖖🏾.