How ( not ) to launch 🚀

Hello IndieHackers 👋

I'm Marco and I've joined this amazing community almost 3 years ago. During this period I was an avid reader of everything you've shared and i always felt in debt since i hadn't nothing meaningful to share back with you.

Today i'd like to repay my debt and hopefully share something useful with you regarding the errors made during the launch of my first website online.

I came up with the idea roughly 3 weeks ago, made a quick search online if there was something similar and nothing showed up. I decided to built it in my spare time and 2 weeks later i had something that i thought it was complete.

My website was ready to be launched. I decided to proceed in 3 steps:

• 1st day - HackerNews : was a complete fail, no traction at all and i've got only 6 upvote, not enough for making it to the front page.
• 2nd day - IndieHackers : was quite better but did not get the engagement that i was excepting ( i guess that it could happen 🙂)
• 3rd day - ProductHunt : was the best source of traction among the three (87 upvote) and even got some paying customer. That day i was euphoric 🥳

All of three launches could have gone a lot better if only i were more prepared. Yes, because like a little kid i hoped that magically all the people would love unconditionally my product and share it.

What i though was a final website in reality it was just a draft, or to be more precise my idea on how to place and promote the product was fuzzy and incomplete:

• I changed the description of my website in each of the launch.
• i even added one basic feature during Product Hunt's launch.
• i did not think about the importance of having a twitter account ( create it later , after PH 🤦‍♂️)
• did not read HackerNews submission rules, i could have changed the title and observe those rules.

Looking back, even if it is only passed one week, the major problem was me being to eager to launch the website. Being my first project ( and a IndieHackers wannabe  👨‍💻) I gave too much importance to the idea of launching it that It made me lose focus on simple things that could have helped a lot.

TL;DR

Launched my website on Hackernews, Indiehackers, Producthunt, but got traction only in the latter. I did not have clear idea about my product and how place it.

If you are about to launch something my takeaways are:

• have a clear positioning for your product ( it helps when you communicate with your users and even with yourselves)
• don't rush into things ( prepare every details of the launch , even perfect product need perfect marketing )
• don't let your enthusiasm think that your product it's so good that everyone will talk about it.
• have a social account before launching ( users can engage directly with you)
• interact with the final users 🗣 ( receive comment and have a conversation with your users is fundamental for understanding how you could shape your product to better fit their needs)

Overall i'm still thrilled of this experience. It gave me a lot of confidence in my capabilities and i'm happy to have made those mistakes since it means next time i'll be more prepared.

I really hope that you could find some help from those words 😇

P.S. If you are curios of what my website is about, you can check it IsRicherThanYou.com and let me know what you think