Launching on ProductHunt today, a few learnings

Just wanted to share a bit of building in public.

Today is our launch day. We're a distributed team working on a startup to tackle the problems Goodreads, a 100M+ users product, doesn't address with its base.

So we made Hardcover, a social media and book app where you can discover new books and make friends based on your reading.

It's been a rousing journey. We started off 9 months ago.
Worked tirelessly while trying to talk to users as much as possible. And now we're here on launch day (which is National Reading day as well).

My takeaway, after spending lots of time on side projects that went in all sorts of directions, is that the team is everything. Naval was right, startups go bust not when they run out of money but when the team runs out of energy. And the particular thing about this case is that all this time, we've kept the energy right up there.

The second take-away is focus on community. I know everybody is talking about it and just a few people know how to gather one around their product. We've got a Discord with about 200 members which we've been constantly showing our product to while we were building it. That helped a lot. If it doesn't vibe with them, you know it's not gonna work. None of us in the team are community managers but somehow we made it work. Key here is to be consistent and to do this as early as possible.

Third and last one, narrative. I've seen so many products with great features that just didn't nail the narrative. Of course, you might say if you're solving a real problem then people will come. But how you present yourself as a solution to that problem can make or break your startup. We've had long debates and have a couple of running options for our value proposition, we've built a story around a character (Jules, our mascot) to support why we need to exist. These are things I'd say you constantly have to work on and revise revise revise.

That's it, hope it was helpful.
If you wanna check it out it's live on ProductHunt over here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/hardcover - don't forget to give it an upvote please if you visit 🙏