3 Mistakes we should have avoided🤦🏾♂️
It's been 3 months since I and @sathesh95 started building LaunchPedia, and we had good number of successes. Also, we did some mistakes that costed us.
These are the mistakes we should have avoided in the first 3 months
1. Not diversifying our traffic channels
We are too much dependent on Product Hunt. Most of the traffic in the first 2 months came from Product hunt launches only. Later we realized that and we started diversifying our channels
2. Tech stack that is not scalable
We used a tech stack that is easy to start as we want to launch faster. That's a good thing, but when we started growing,we spent way too much time on migration. We should have used the tech stack that has room to grow.
3. No Monetization Plans
We thought we can keep LaunchPedia running with sponsorships and buy me a coffee donations, but that is turning out to be tough. Because you need to keep getting consistent traffic every day to achieve that.
These are the things we should have realized earlier, so that we could have avoided it. But I think mistakes are a part of startup and all we can do is learning from it and working on them.
How we are planning on improving them?
📝 Increasing our Traffic Sources
We are optimizing our website's SEO, sharing our jounrey on Indiehackers, and Posting on twitter.
And We are looking to building side project for our target audience and drive traffic to LaunchPedia website
💰 Working on a paid product
We are looking build some paid product and drive traffic from LaunchPedia. So this way we can keep LaunchPedia free and bring food to our table.
This is what we have planned for this month!!
Checkout our website https://launchpedia.co/ and share your suggestions on how we can monetize our website or increasing our traffic sources.
Also, Share your mistakes in the comments, so that other founders can be aware of them and avoid them.
Great lessons.
One mistake I'd add: treating distribution, monetization, and scalability as things to figure out later.
The strongest startups think about all three from day one. That's why GTM planning matters as much as product development.
Foundersbar's GTM service helps founders build a path to customers before growth becomes a bottleneck: https://foundersbar.com/gtm-for-startups
Thank you for sharing. What was your previous tech stack and what did you end up switching to?
We have used aerotable plugin for wordpress for creating posts from airtable, now we have created custom posts in wordpress manually.
And we ran our newsletter on substack, now we moved to mailerlite.
Why move from Substack? Any problems with it as an email platform?
Your website is a goldmine for people looking to scale up their products. Looks like you've put in all the lessons that you've learnt from your product launch! What has been the best channel for you to drive traffic to your website?
Thanks a lot Varun 🤗
These are traffic sources ( in the order)
Product Hunt is our Major source
Thanks for sharing, Karthik!
What was the original tech stack that did not scale for you? Was it Rails?
No!!
We have used aerotable plugin for wordpress for creating posts from airtable, now we have created custom posts in wordpress manually.
And we ran our newsletter on substack, now we moved to mailerlite.
You are doing great work, and I love the case study you have shared on your site. It is valuable. Mistakes are a part of startups, and mostly people make them.
The great thing is that if you notice the mistake early on, you can improve it in a short time, and you have not lost much. But if you notice it when you have completed 70% of the race, it will be less fruitful.
Keep up your great work!
Thanks a lot James 🤗
amazingly written piece
Thanks a lot 🤗
Most folks think of marketing as the need to find "the channel that works for them" and then set it and forget it.
But as you've realized, success in GTM is a series of small wins, constantly evolving.
It's best to think in terms of Near, Mid, and Long term channel initiatives (experiments etc), building out a matrix of your channels, segments, and key messages.
Lay this out on a calendar and start hammering away.
Good luck!
Thanks for your inputs, will try focusing on mid term and long term too.
Your website has really great potential, it could definitely be beneficial for people starting to build their product. Good luck!
Thanks a lot Alexa 🤗
Thank you for sharing! This information was useful for me
Glad to know that it will help you Adrianna
Have you seen good results from product hunt launches?
Yeah, we have got good traffic from Product Hunt launches. Apart from traffic, our website also got mentioned in some newsletters and websites.
Interesting, congratulations Karhik!
Cool information, thanks. Here are a few thoughts:
not diversifying our traffic channels:
That's why I started using pSEO on my new project LogHive when it launched recently. I write about 2-3 blog articles every week which I then multiply via pSEO. I hope to get organic traffic slowly but steadily. Maybe something for you?
tech stack that is not scalable:
Good tip. have I also just overlooked. 1-2 weeks more time invested and everything would have been scalable.... I'm just working on it.
Cool man, 2-3 article per week is great. We are now optimizing our SEO, once that's donw we will focus on creating content.
nice information!! Thanks for sharing :) I'll check out your website.
Cool, let me know if you have any ideas on how we can monetize it
I believe a way to drive traffic and also do some monetization would be to offer tools that would be helpful for launching but also offer some kind of directory, i believe your product could fit in the niche of education and target more of business major students
These informations are gold, thanks 🫶
How much traffic do you have there? What about proposing a spot on your website for people having their launch on ProductHunt, so they gain more visibility and can get some upvotes from you site? You could prob monetise that (just random thought)
Following my edit- Maybe instead of paying for the month, have some promotion spots on a
per daybasis? As I suggested, related to ProductHunt launches for instance. When your product is on ProductHunt, you might want the spot for the day only, would be a smaller price to pay and smaller one time income- as people learning how to launch a product might not be the richest one, a one day fee would be more acceptable (Speaking for myself at least ahah)This is a good idea, but average visitors for our website per day is just 100. where as monthly visitors is around 4500-5000. Like there are high traffic days and low traffic days. So, what if the sponsor promoted their product on the low traffic day. That's the reason we are having only monthly sponsorships.
Thanks for your suggestion, once the daily visits picks up and we have traffic coming consistently, we will try this
Thanks for sharing this wisdom! I feel like my biggest mistake was choosing the wrong tools for SEO early and investing incorrectly in content that ultimately didn't convert
I'm still trying to figure out SEO!
What are the tools you have used thag didn't work for you?
The main thing was using a wordpress blog instead of Ghost - I'm not a developer, so I used Elementor and it slowed down my site a lot and it was difficult to balance pagespeed with the custom designs i was going for. Then I got lucky and collaborated with a developer to set up Ghost.io and improved our website with ReactJS and Tailwind. I guess now it's just a matter of continuing to get backlinks to our domain
Okay, WordPress management and speed optimization can be daunting task, if we are new to wordpress.
How is Ghost by the way?
Ghost seems to be pretty good for SEO at this point. A lot of big companies are using it for their blogs (e.g. Apple). I like the way my site is performing!
Here it is if you're curious: https://blog.kahana.co/
Design is awesome Adam and the blog loaded in seconds. Love it 😍
Glad you like it! I truly hope other see this and don't waste the time, money, and effort I did on wordpress -____-