Our ProductHunt launch was a flop, looking for guidance
Hi everyone. We launched our product on ProductHunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/polycred
Sadly, it didn't really go anywhere at all. Now I'm wanting to try again, but I don't know if that's even possible? Seems like once you've posted it, that's it.
At the time I wrongly assumed that all I would need to do was post it on producthunt and the PH community would notice it, but in reality I think it required some additional planning to bring in support from outside PH. As it was, it just got drowned out by all the other listings on that day.
Is there anything I can do to salvage it at this point? Or have I wasted my opportunity? Thanks.
Don't take it to heart — keep your head down and keep working. Years ago, we could post projects on PH and they would get traction if they were good.
Now, it's more friends patting friend's backs, and PH is focused on monetizing their waitlist/launch subscriptions. Unless you have an audience and spend a couple weeks promoting, you'll get pushed off the list within minutes.
If you spend a month building, then put a couple weeks into hyping your product, you could post again as "Polycred beta/v1/v2" or similar; as long as it's a major update and added features.
Best of luck, I'll keep an eye out for your next go!
"PH is focused on monetizing their waitlist/launch subscriptions"
does that mean that if we are able to pay for the launch service that we can pretty much guarantee homepage promotion and a lot more interest in our product?
Not necessarily.
If you look through producthunt.com/upcoming (which are the people that buy PH's Ship subscription), you'll see some of them say the number of subscribers. Some have thousands, some have handfuls.
What Ship does is allows you to build a waitlist before hunting your product to the homepage. This can make it easier for you to get the first bump of upvotes to que the algorithm and give you a better chance at staying on the list and getting more votes.
Not to mention, you can use the subscribers to further validate your product, improve, and build the audience that will help your product be worthy of upvotes on launch day.
I've never tried PH's Ship product, but this is the general idea behind it.
Product Hunt is just one channel to reach users. Here are some more you can try: https://medium.com/@yegg/the-19-channels-you-can-use-to-get-traction-93c762d19339
Also check out IH user @zerotousers who regularly posts about channels that have worked for others (based on evidence).
I launched my first product on PH, and by some miracle it got 'featured'.
It seems that PH has two buckets of products, those that get featured and get posted to the popular section of the homepage for the day. Everything else goes into 'newest' and gets drowned out by all the other products being launched.
I have no idea why my product got featured and yours didn't. Mine isn't particularly special, and I didn't have a team of friends waiting to like it as soon as it was posted. I really think it was down to luck in my case - and as rndlph says, I wouldn't take it to heart!
@Polycred don't worry about it! Shake it off and move to the next one. There are around 150+ alternatives to PH where you can launch and spread the word about what you're doing. Here's the free list of sites if you're interested :)
Hey don't worry, just launch again in a month or so. Update the product according to feedback and try to make it better for the users you have and don't worry about others and launch again and again check this https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-and-again as well
I'm wondering, why did you post it on PH? I looked at your listing and read through the value prop and I don't think the majority of your customers have even heard of PH.
Put simply, how it does on PH is not an indicator of success.
With respect to the product itself:
My biggest concern is that you may be solving a problem that most major mail providers have already solved. Gmail for example categorizes my mail, so I don't really have to deal with spam or unwanted emails. Outlook offers a similar feature with the Focus inbox. Now I'm using Hey and they have a screener, which asks me to decide how to triage emails. One option is not to see some emails at all.
Considering this, I wonder what your market testing showed. I may be completely off.
I don't mean to be overly critical, I hope this is helpful.
I don't believe we're solving a problem that mail providers have already solved. Spam is one angle, but privacy and security is another. For example, if your email address is leaked online, yeah your inbox may manage the spam for you if it's smart enough (although I'd argue lots of it would still get through - and consistently, until the end of time), but now a piece of your identity has been leaked. You also have no idea which company is responsible for leaking your data, which is a useful thing to know. Using Polycred would allow you to figure that out.
It's common for people to use their personal names in their emails, so now your name has potentially been leaked as well. If you re-use passwords, which is fairly common, now you've given attackers a way to attempt logins on all of the similar sites you may be using and all of the popular sites (like facebook, instagram, etc). If your password was leaked, maybe they'll even be able to access your email account itself. If you were a cryptocurrency user, now you've given attackers an angle to work their way into your accounts through social engineering efforts - take the recent Ledger hardware wallet leak for example. Spam is only one piece of the picture. Perhaps I'm wrong in assuming it's the largest piece and that may need to be something reflected in the copy-writing.
As for value proposition evaluation, there are other services out there that are doing this - but they aren't as good. For example, Firefox Relay: https://relay.firefox.com/ - which only supports a single browser, has barely any features, doesn't have a customizable embedded dropdown on email fields (only a generate button), and has alias creation restrictions, no customizability or the ability to reply to emails, etc. There is also a massive audience that uses disposable emails right now, and this is a better fit for most of them because it's far more convenient.
In terms of launching anywhere else, not really. I manually submitted our service to about 70 different startup directories, but I'm not sure you'd call that a "launch". We didn't have a pre-built audience to launch for, we were busy trying to make the product as quick as we could. Are there some other places I should be looking at aside from directories that jump out at you?
I also flopped on Product Hunt a couple of months ago. Still grinding.
You are considering it to be a flop because you might have considered Product Hunt as your only way to launch your product which a lot of founders maker (which is a mistake) when they plan their go-to-approach to get the word out.
Here are a few questions:
There are two other aspects that I observed when I checked out the link. Your profile is totally new (but you directly posted your product link), and you haven't really spoken about how your product is different from that of the current alternatives available - these could be few of the many reasons it did not go well.
Hope you get the best out of your next PH launch (which can happen only after 6 months after your previous launch as per their terms - if there is a huge upgrade it can happen even under 6 months after manual review by PH team)
P.s: I have been one of the top nominees of Product Hunt Community Member of the year for 3-4 years in a row so I have fairly understood what works and what doesn't based on launching 100s products and 1-to-1 consultation calls with founders. I am also the creator of phmastery.com which has been made available since the Sep'20.
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"a club made up of 99% of people who post on product hunt"
I had to laugh ;-) this reminded me of consultancy networking events in the late 90's when I was an IT consultant (god I feel old!). I would always decline to go to them as they were always made up of "other bearded geeks, sweating in to their beers while selling themselves to potential clients".
Or to put it another way... "everybody is selling, nobody is buying"