After such a long time building our startup, our launch got so much traffic our site crashed. Here are some tips I have to achieve the same.

Here's the product:
https://joincheckmate.com/

Back-story:

At the start of covid my friend and I came up with a way to make a chrome extension that would save users twice as much as all the competitors.

I thought it would be a fairly easy engineering process and dove headfirst in, but it ended up being a 546 day (with multiple alpha releases that were not good enough) process and at times nearly drove me insane. I have no idea how we stuck it out to be honest, there were times I didn't see the sun for days at a time and was making 50+ git commits per day.

After being in private Alpha for MONTHS, we finally launched our Beta to the public last night and we got thousands of hits on the website and our sign up auth got rate limited which, despite being a disaster, was also the most amazing feeling ever considering we were close to giving up at some points.

With the positive launch feedback we're getting from everyone, we now have a strong roadmap into fleshing this out into a real thing and all my love for coding has returned.

Here is everything I've learned:

1 - Know your market! My co-founder spent months talking to young Mums, college students, prolific online shoppers. He joined dozens of online super-saver groups. We learned about all their shopping habits, how they like to see their deals, what frustrates them and where they like to shop.

2 - Once you have a product MVP - Talk deeply with your users. Like, really deeply. We scheduled almost 50 calls over the last 6 months with our test users and watched them use our extension on screen share to make sure we understood what would/wouldn't be a good UX. Even on the day we launched our beta I did two more calls with friends to watch them go through our new onboarding flow. Our test users also uncovered bugs that we could never have dreamed of finding. Once you've built a product for so many months, you lose all perspective on what is or is not obvious.

3 - Connecting with your users and market early is a core part of a successful launch. Because we had connected with hundreds of people in the lead up to our Beta launch to gather feedback, all of those people signed up and shared it during the launch because they felt like it was built specifically for them.

4 - Product market fit means that the users who are MOST LIKELY to use your product are able to use it well. A core demographic of our users are people who are not very technologically savvy. What this means is that getting QA from fellow coders on whether your product is good is almost meaningless if the demographic are not coders / engineers. We made sure that our parents could complete the somewhat complex sign up process unassisted and were not comfortable launching until they could.

5 - If you can't say exactly what your product is in just a few words, you might need to re-think how it works/what problem it is solving. I see so many landing pages with vague abstract copy such as "Connecting people, places and things" or something ridiculous like that. Find exactly what you're solving and just say it. Or - if the product is genuinely complex, just say on the landing page exactly who it is for. For instance, Brex market their complex credit card products as just "The credit card for founders" - this means if you're a founder and you read this you immediately want to read more even though you don't know why it's necessarily for you yet. It amazes me how many landing pages try to be mysterious and abstract looking; unless you have a GIGANTIC following like Apple / Elon, this strategy isn't going to work for you.

6 - In order to build the product we thought would we best, we had to partner deeply with Google and Microsoft’s cloud teams to get access to the restricted API scopes. This is a very slow process and took us almost 6 months to get approved (including a lengthy and expensive security audit process). The one key take-away I have from this is to be VERY patient. Google are amazing at what they do but they move slowly and tick all the boxes - we worked with the Cloud Trust & Safety team almost every single day and our policy was to never be the bottle-neck (we would always endeavor to respond and fix anything they brought up within an hour) so that they were never waiting on us. It took months and months but has created a huge technical barrier for anyone who wants to copy us, knowing that they would need to go through the same (expensive) process.

7 - Tell your idea to everyone you meet. We got so much good advice and feedback by just talking about it. People worry so much about protecting their IP but the reality is there are a million good ideas and all that matters is the execution. My co-founder and I talked about it with absolutely everyone we could and it really helped to shape the product’s UX.

After spending so long on the dev process, it's amazing to see this out in the world and share my learnings. I recognize these learnings are ad-hoc to our specific product but I do think most of these lessons apply to most consumer facing products.