Postmortem: Recent Launch on Product Hunt 🚀

Hi IH! 👋

I built a SaaS starter-kit built on top of modern technologies such as Next.JS + Prisma. This was launched on March 3, 2022.

It has been in development since January this year and I've been gathering feedback on what are the basic SaaS features that founders should not sweat about to help them focus on building the core of their solutions. The feedback gathered resulted in Nextacular. (http://nextacular.co)

Now, this post is a postmortem analysis of what transpired during the launch.

1. I wasn't expecting much during the launch, since up 'til this day I'm still learning the ropes of PH launch (launched 3-4 side projects already, 2 of which were wrongly timed 😅)

2. We launched on the 12:01th hour start of the day. Other products were already gaining a lot of momentum while I was at 5 votes, the first product is already in their 40th vote

3. The target users/market for my open-source project are would-be SaaS founders and developers, helping them speed up the development of their platforms is one of my goals. My value proposition and unclear advantage might've been one of the reasons why it resulted in low votes turnout

4. At the end of the day, I got a lot of impressions and site visits from PH. It drove a lot of traffic to the landing page, demo site, and GitHub repo. I believe it was worth it since one of my goals is just to put the product out there for people to see

5. The upvotes were not my final goal, though it could've helped in the visibility of the project. The results at the end of the day allowed me to manage and respond just enough to those who are interested and built a community around them (I'm a solo hacker and I guess it worked for the best)

6. Vercel also built a similar product, I shared the idea with one of their developers and I received a great (5-star) recommendation and review from them

7. Cross-posted in Twitter, Reddit (relevant subreddits), and IH about the launch (I only have a few Twitter following)

8. Contacted the early adopters I was in talks with prior to the launch, and they were game to give their upvotes and support the project

9. I could've searched for a Hunter for the launch, but I opted to do it myself and see what happens. The product was cruising between the 11th-13th spot during the day and ended up in the 13th spot. To date, the product is at the 12th spot, after I shared it with other marketing communities

10. PH is not the ultimate end-all-be-all goal for all product launches. My market might not be on that platform, but it allowed me to expose the project in ways I could not have imagined, gained support, interesting partnerships, and amazing feedback

Overall, I think it did pretty well (others might say it tanked due to upvotes and ranking). Pretty well in a way that I was able to achieve stats I wasn't able to achieve before and have a manageable amount of supporters that I can directly communicate to.

GitHub: 60+ stars, 15+ forks, 15+ collaborators joined
Gumroad: $50+ tips for an open-source project, 45+ subscriptions
Demo Site: 70+ signups
Lots of private inquiries

Launching it was just the start of the solidification of the validation. Finding if there were people interested in such product. I will still continue to promote and work on this project, it's one of those projects that give you enough adrenaline to continue working on it. Besides, I can use this project for my own SaaS platforms soon. This is not a post handing out tips for your launch. This is a post about what might happen after launching your product.

As a founder, you must know or at least have an inkling on where to find your market/users.

I'd be happy to answer questions and receive feedback from this community. Thank you!