We launched to 10 new customers today

this product

We launched HelloCast today.

HelloCast's aim is to provide one dedicated place for podcasters to plan future episode ideas, log show research, map guests (with bios and contact info) to those episodes, write show notes, push episodes to Google Calendar, and more. No more juggling of numerous apps to do this, like 90% of podcasters we spoke to do.

We landed our first customer within 10 minutes of the announcement email going out to 104 people, and two more within 20 minutes! I'm smart enough to know you don't proclaim victory on day one of any new product being launched. And you definitely shouldn't you tell the world "This is how you do product launches..." when you've done exactly one in your life.

So I'll just tell you what we did, as a brief summary, since I know many people are in our situation. We could have every one of these things better, and we could have added numerous other tasks to our launch plan, including building an email list over the course of X months prior to launching.

1. I started with my own pain points as a podcaster for the vision of HelloCast. I had used Google Sheets, Trello, Evernote, and Airtable to plan my episodes and desired guests. Airtable was the closest thing to what I wanted, but it wasn't built to manage podcasts obviously, so there was an opportunity, I felt.
2. I partnered with a developer I'd worked with before and had a great relationship with. While not a podcast guy, he was generally on-board, as long as we did some validation before logging hundreds of hours of dev time.
3. I posted in Facebook groups and on Reddit, asking podcasters how they plan their future episodes and manage their guests for their shows. Their answers were a reality check for whether my pain points were unique to me or shared by many. (Spoiler: They were shared by many!)
4. We built a landing page with screenshots that didn't really exist yet, then started very slowly to build the MVP in July behind the scenes.
5. I invited about 10 podcasters I know personally, and cold emailed another 150-200, inviting them all to visit the landing page, which made it clear that HelloCast didn't exist yet, but they could 'raise their hand' requesting access. We got about 35-40 people raising their hand (we could have, but didn't ask them to pay).
6. My co-founder Phil finished building HelloCast in October, and I invited just about everyone who raised their hands previously to create an account, and cold emailed another 100 or so podcasters.
7. Lastly, about 3 weeks ago, I posted in one Facebook group dedicated to podcasters, inviting more into the beta. Wow, the number of people who reached out was crazy. 50 or so within a day. And as they created accounts, the feedback came quickly.
8. As of 2 weeks ago, we had 75 total beta users, with another 25-ish who had raised their hand but we hadn't given beta access to yet. We got some great bug feedback, critical pushback on an interface issue, and several new ideas thrown at us.
9. Late last week we asked ourselves the question: Do we really need more feedback at this point? Most of the core features are built. We've got Black Friday coming up in the U.S. The answer was no, we don't need more feedback. But the one thing we don't know is this: Will people pay for HelloCast now, with the current set of features and maybe a few more we know we should build? Before we invest any more time in development or promotion, should we now find that out?
10. Well, today we launched to take advantage of Black Friday and to "fund" these final 5-6 features we know need to exist.

We decided that if we can pick up 10 people willing to say yes with their wallets, given the small size of our list and the limited help from other sources to promote us, that would be more than satisfactory.

Well, we picked up our 10 on the first day today. And Black Friday isn't here yet. The deadline to signup with our Black Friday pricing isn't until Midnight on Monday.

It's not about the amount of revenue for us, for these next 3-6 months. It's about validation for https://www.indiehackers.com/product/hellocast. (You can see our product at https://hellocast.co.) But where we are now, we're really excited.