Learnings from my Product Hunt launch (in real time)
Hey indie hackers 👋
As I type this, it's the middle of my launch day on Product Hunt. ZipMessage currently stands at #4, close to jumping into the #3 spot today...
I'll try and keep this real-time report up to date as I learn more today and the days after launch. Please comment below with any questions you'd like me to expand upon.
By the way, the tagline, for those who are unfamiliar with ZipMessage is:
Replace live meetings with async video messages
Who am I?
I'm Brian Casel, co-host of the Bootstrapped Web podcast (7+ years!)
Before ZipMessage, I built and sold Audience Ops (productized content service), and before that I built and sold Restaurant Engine (websites for hospitality), among several other products in my history.
Things I did to prepare my Product Hunt launch
Leave a comment if you'd like me to expand on any of these:
- Chose a Tuesday in January to launch
- Asked my friend @mijustin to be hunter. He was able to pre-schedule it. We scheduled it for midnight PST on January 11th, which is when Product Hunt resets their featured listings.
- Recorded a new demo video with intro/outtro that speaks to Product Hunt
- Created a set of "explainer" images for the PH listing
- Drafted the description text, edited it down multiple times.
- Drafted my first comment, edited multiple times.
- Started Tweeting about it ~5 days before launch day.
- Sent an email newsletter to the list (almost all are users) about a week before to mention that the PH launch is coming.
- Ensured our onboarding was all tidy'd up, shipped some UX improvements, and re-ran all of our tests.
- Recorded an episode of our podcast, Bootstrapped Web, so that it would be ready to publish the same day ZipMessage launches on Product Hunt.
Things I did at launch time
- (scheduled) email newsletters to my product list as well my personal email list(s)
- Woke up at 3am EST (midnight PST) to live Tweet the launch! Stayed up for an hour Tweeting and sharing it with folks.
- Sent direct ZipMessage messages to our most active customers and asked them to leave their review on Product Hunt.
The first few hours...
We got off to a quick start, but a few others took the top spots early in the day. Launching at midnight helped us with activity from the European crowd early in the day.
I noticed that 2 of the products in the top spots were focused on live meetings. ZipMessage is designed to replace live meetings with async messages. This inspired me to change our tagline on PH to "Replace live meetings with async video messages"
Twitter is my go-to social network (besides lurking in communities like Indie Hackers!) and where all my founder-friends connect most days.
I'm very active in my DMs in general, but especially so today, during launch.
I'm trying not to be too self-promotional in my Tweets, but if there's ever a day for that, I suppose it's launch day ;) Trying to pick and choose my spots and moments when it seems most helpful to Tweet again about the launch, offering new information each time.
The RT's from our community and supporters have been amazing ❤️
Impact on the business
As I type this (midway through launch day)...
- We've already seen several more paying customers convert than normal.
- LOTS more free signups than normal (expected)
- There appear to be a fair number of brand new people discovering ZipMessage, which was a key goal here. But the vast majority of support seems to be coming from our long-time users and followers of my work (which I greatly appreciate! ❤️)
Things I might have done differently
One thing that comes to mind would be being more active Product Hunt's community in the weeks leading up to launch. I lurked there a bit and thought about participating, but it just felt unnatural to become active for a short few weeks prior to launch.
I also could have subscribed to their Ship product and used that to build an early list in Product Hunt. Someone told me I could have imported my list there, but I didn't do that. Instead I tried to keep support and my activity as organic, natural, and real as possible.
