My wild ride from product idea → Product Hunt launch and paying customers 😅🔥

Today's the day!

I just launched VideoMentions.com on Product Hunt:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/videomentions

Getting the product there has been a wild ride! I started with a nugget of an idea, built out an MVP, and then let the market guide the product from there, causing it to morph into an even more powerful, useful, and desirable tool. Here's my story and lessons learned.

Product origin story

I was SHOCKED when I learned that none of the existing social media listening tools out there listen for brand mentions within the spoken words of YouTube videos. I wanted that feature to exist so I would know when content creators in my niche mention my brand, my product, and other topics I care about in the spoken words of their videos. I figured I couldn't be the only one with a need for a tool like that so I decided to build it and turn it into a SaaS app (admittedly, without much validation 😅).

I was excited! I had been looking for a SaaS product idea for a while. I created an MVP, tweeted about it, and posted about it in some Subreddits. From those marketing efforts, I got a handful of paying customers. Not a ton, but it was something.

Phase 2: Engineering as marketing

One of my customers told me that he'd like to be able to fire off on-the-fly searches for brand mentions in the spoken words of already-published YouTube videos. I had already built the tech to fetch data for new YouTube videos and scan the spoken words for keyword matches. I knew that I could reuse much of that code and build an interface to allow users to search existing YouTube videos for matches, too; it was technically very possible.

Around this time, I was reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares. In that book, they discuss the "Engineering as Marketing" tactic. In a nutshell, it involves leveraging engineering skills to produce a useful free tool and then using that free tool to upsell people to the paid product. Inspired by that idea, I decided to create VideoMentions Search, a free tool anyone can use for finding brand mentions in the spoken words of already-published YouTube videos (go give it a try!).

The #1 spot on the Hacker News "Show HN" page 😎

As soon as my free tool was live, I posted it to the Show HN page of Hacker News where it hit the #1 spot for the day! While that felt good and I had fun geeking out with other techies there about how I built it ("How can you offer this tool for free without hitting YouTube's API limits?!?!"), that marketing tactic generated a whopping 0 new paying customers 😭. My takeaway is that the crowd that hangs out on Hacker News is very interested in how a product is built from a technical standpoint, but they're not the type of people who would sign up for a YouTube keyword monitoring service. Makes sense. I did have a few bloggers write about VideoMentions Search, which got me some backlinks and better domain authority for my website, so some good came out of it.

The best part about this phase of the journey was that I had started to let the market dictate the product's direction and go where it led me.

Phase 3: Build the thing they want!

Building my free VideoMentions Search tool and trying to use it to upsell people to my YouTube keyword monitoring tool was a hard sell. Part of this, I think, is because the two are very different. Someone may love being able to search existing YouTube videos based on spoken words but have no use for a keyword listening tool.

Thankfully, a couple of my customers gave me the idea I pursued next. They said that the free search tool was useful, but that it would be even more powerful if they could search across multiple channels and keywords at once.

When I built my free tool, I had intentionally limited it to only one channel and one keyword at a time for searches so that I could keep the server costs down and still be able to offer the tool for free. Modifying my free tool to support multiple channels and keywords would balloon the cost significantly, and the people who use it don't pay me a dime to offset that cost. So I knew that wasn't a good idea.

I decided that if a more advanced search tool was what my paying customers were asking for, that's what they would have! 😄 I embarked upon building out my new "Advanced Search" feature (very creative naming, I know!). This new search feature allows users to select as many channels and keywords as they want, exclude matches if they contain specific keywords, and constrain the search results to specific date ranges. I added this feature to the paid product, and overhauled my whole marketing page to position VideoMentions as a product with two features: "Listening" and "Advanced Search". You can see this new positioning on my homepage. My hope is that this sweetens the deal and that business owners who hang out in places like Product Hunt are persuaded by the value prop this expanded feature set offers.

So...did it work?

I don't know! I hope so! My Product Hunt launch is live RIGHT NOW!

Should I circle back and update this post with the results? Would you like to know how this chapter of the story ends? How many sales I made? Let me know!

Also– if you can support my product launch, that would be appreciated. Thanks! 🙏 🙌