List of Firsts & Lessons Learned (Lauch, Marketing, Visitors & Users)

June was a BIG month for me. It was the big 3-0 birthday, meaning im supposed to be an adult now AND I hit a bunch of firsts with my side project.

PRODUCT HUNT LAUNCH
At the start of June I did my first Product Hunt Launch, which was the start of this journey. I got some pretty good results with about a ~1,000 or so visitors, reaching the #5 slot for the day and made the email highlights the next day. My favourite part about the Product Hunt launch was the engagement in the comments. I made sure to reply to every single person and it created conversation around what I was building and I got HUGE amounts of feedback. The week after release was probably the most productive development time I've had on this product and it got instant feedback from those taking part in the conversation.

SIGNED UP USERS
This started a bit late for me after the launch as I put it up about 3rd week of June. Lesson learnt here is maybe put signup prior to a big event like a product hunt launch. Im on about 40 signups (free tier) where as I could have probably 10x or even 20x that if I;d implemented it prior to PH launch. Im using email magic link sign up which I personally really like but I plan to integrate federated login with facebook, Google, etc to see if numbers increase as magic link requires users coming off site.

REDDIT MARKETING
My second first was REDDIT MARKETING with posts in places like r/sideproject, r/entrepeneurs, and other reddits specific to my industry. I was suprised again how well this went. I made sure to keep my titles snappy with things like "I made X so that Y" where X is the feature/product and Y is the problem im trying to solve. When I could I made them either a picture or link style post as I found this got more upvotes and traction, I even made the all time top posts page on a couple of smaller sub reddits. Like Product Hunt I made sure to reply to every single comment made on my posts to create conversation & get feedback for my product development. Learning here is i can do much much more on Reddit than I do now. Everytime I do I increase my traffic by a factor of 3.

QUORA MARKETING
So this im not so good at. My first here is being banned from Quora for 2 weeks. Which is a real pain because it would be so valuable to be able to respond to questions in my industry and point people to my project. Why did i get banned? I posted to many answers consecutively that where too generic. I got lazy, i got into spam mode. Lessons learned: answer with higher quality content directed at the current question and answer less t help facilitate writing better answers.

COMMUNITY
This first kind of developed over the month and happened because of the way I responded to things like the launch and the marketing I did. Its a small community art the moment but I now have a list of users I can get feedback from and who are willing to provide it. These people have helped with all parts of the project imaginable. There have been people on Reddit helping with SEO, Marketing, Pricing advice. There are users willing to provide tonnes of feedback on the features I build or plan to build. This helps me prioritise the work I do in development. I have now have a set of testers that let me know if theres a bug or something doesnt quite work as expected. The lesson I learnt here is be active in the community and by that I mean reply, reply, reply and be as helpful as I can be. No spam, no marketing speech, just actual human conversation and trying to help. This has actually become one of my favourite parts of the side project, which is suprising because I thought I would hate it.

Well that was a long post and there are a bunch more fists I could write about but I'm hesitant to make the post even longer. I've added my FIRST MONTH Google Analytics results so you can see the data to go along with my story :)

Happy Hacking.