Originally posted on Blurt: "Covfefe Learnings"
Someone finally made a simple way to edit your tweets, inspired by President Trump's famous 'covfefe' typo
Edit Typos in Your Tweets Using This Chrome Extension
How to edit tweets with Covfefe so you don't embarrass yourself on Twitter
— BetaNews
Big thanks to everyone at WIP.chat who provided feedback and advice on Covfefe.
Covfefe a silly app, but launching it has been a great learning experience for me. I've never launched something that's garnered this much interest so thought I'd share some of the things I learned as a result.
Launch Day Is All Day
I posted to Product Hunt late in the AM, California time. It'd be wise to post in the early AM (like 12-1 AM PST) so it's there well ahead of prime time. (Mistake on my part for staying up late preparing...) I tried to get some rest, but I should've gotten the rest the day before. I also should have paid attention to what else was launching that day. (If only I had had Preview Hunt before launching @AndreyAzimov! 😆) It all panned out fine, but timing matters and I needed to be better prepared. Rookie mistake. Lesson learned.
Also learned I need to better prepare for launching to different communities — PH, reddit, HackerNews, the media, etc. There's different strategies for posting to each — titles, descriptions, and timing. It takes time to craft good intros. That's all valuable time during the early hours of a launch day. It'd be smart to have all your copy prepared ahead of time. I'll put together a spreadsheet for the future.
Once people start using your thing, you'll get lots of feedback and discover hidden bugs. I was fortunate to be able to resolve some of the egregious issues early on, but resolving unforeseen issues is something to be prepared for.
Haters
I've learned to not fret haters—including myself. I thought for sure I'd get roasted by fellow makers as Covfefe doesn't modify the existing tweet. A good majority understood I was limited by Twitter's APIs and ended up loving the name and thought the features it had were slick anyways. If I had worried about a backlash, I'd have missed this opportunity to learn. There were some nitpickers, but they had no impact. Having haters is a good problem to have. It means you've discovered something people care about. There will always be haters once you've reached a point that others are taking notice. Just do your best to ignore it, do what's right and navigate the hate with class. Thanks to Marc and others for motivating me to go through with the launch as I wouldn't have otherwise.
Journalists
I learned a bit about how to reach out and interact with journalists—made connections with a few. The aim was to try and reach virality by getting a number of outlets to cover Covfefe. I thought they'd get a kick out of the Kim-Trump-Jack potential of the story.
I contacted a number of them and didn't get many bites, but I don't think any of them would have noticed if I hadn't reached out to them. It takes a considerable effort to do, but I think it pays off to personalize your message to them. Important to make sure it's something they'll be genuinely interested in. Check if they've written on the topic or in the space related to your product. Keep it simple but interesting enough to get their interest. Prove you're not another spam blast in their inbox.
Also thanks to Markia who shared submit.co with me. It's a great resource for knowing where to start searching for journalists to contact to get the most bang for your buck.
Learn to Build, Build to Learn
I highly recommend everyone build and launch a small project with the simple intention of learning. Just build something you think is fun or thought provoking and launch it on PH. I spent five days on Covfefe and learned more in a few days than I have building Blurt over the last two months. Blurt is definitely more complex to build, but the learnings from Covfefe will help me know how to navigate launching Blurt.
Building software is one small part of the maker skill set. Launching, writing copy so people know what you've done, interacting with others, marketing, keeping your software user friendly, and other things required you don't even realize you'll need to do. All these things you can't learn unless you launch something and are just as important as building. Just launch something small but interesting. It doesn't need to be perfect. It'll teach you what it does take to garner and sustain interest and you'll be surprised at what you learn.
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Do you have a game plan for launching your product? Do you know how you will introduce it to others? Would sharing your launch experiences help others?
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