Royally screwed up our launch - can we still fix this? Or is there no hope?
Hey IndieHackers!
We've just launched our product, MailMaestro on Product Hunt
today (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mailmaestro), and it's been a major flop! Do we still have a chance?
Here's what happened:
Our original plan is to launch on Nov 13th at 12:01 AM PST. Now, I, being really bad at timezone conversions, was closely anticipating the moment of launch. We've been checking our clock and saw that it's already past the scheduled time and our product still hasn't gone live yet -- WEIRD, so I thought maybe it's a bug as I have experienced something similar from a different platform a while back.
So what I did is I went to manually launch the product live right at that moment and I thought wooo, problem solved. It was live and then we were getting upvotes.
Later did I realize something's off and remembered something... "DAYLIGHT SAVING".
It turned out, there was no bug, and that the time we launched wasn't Nov 13 at 12:01 AM YET, rather, it was ACTUALLY Nov 12 at 11 PM something.
I knew instantly we were screwed. We launched ~45mins earlier.
We were nowhere to be found under the "Products Launching Today".
We were found under "Products Yesterday" instead, so we had ZERO chance to be featured as Product of the Day because the launch day technically has ended for us already.
Luckily, we were able to get help from the Product Hunt team after an hour or two and they were able to help us move our Launch Day to the correct one.
Now we're back, but I know that the first 4 hours of the day is the most crucial to have the algorithm favor the product, and we're stuck at 30+ upvotes while the leaders are already near 200.
My question is, since we were out of the ranking for the first ~2-3 hours of the day, do we still have any chance to rank high? Or are we royally screwed?
Did anyone else also ran to the same problem before? Any tips/recommendations?
Is just product hunt.... Just keep working on your plans.
Good stuff, I guess when you think about it, it's not the end of the world considering it's our first time launching. Definitely a good learning curve.
I have launch almost 60 products on PH, and the only thing i use it for is for awareness.
Not even for sales or something, but awareness...
Is just not worth your time, is full of bots,...
thanks for the advice, didn't realize it was full of bots 😲
look at the comments they leave..
I did screw up too, lauched on 'solo maker' speciifc category and pretty late in day which resulted in 2 upvotes. 😅 Well, have to learn from mistakes and do better next time.
Is it bad to launch on solo maker? I'm launching soon too and I'm also a solo founder.
Well, i would not do it again.
Good luck with your launch, will definitely give my support! And hope you learn from my mistakes re: timing!
Thanks!
Oh no! Sorry to hear that. Have you also done any pre-launch marketing?
Amy Hoy has a concept that I find really helpful: 1,000 launches. That is, if you can only launch once, and it flops, oh no! But if you're planning on launching a thousand times, and one of those launches flops, it's disappointing but no big deal in the grand scheme of things. More here: https://shop.stackingthebricks.com/crash-course
Love that perspective. Will definitely keep that in mind!
Hello! I am sorry this happened but it's just one launch right? I am sure there will be many many more launches down the line. As long as you learn from things going wrong, you will be fine. Best of luck!
you're right, guess I was too fixated before to make the launch perfect, but I realize now that it's just the first of many 💪
This was me today, just got a few notifications that "People are noticing your launch" or something like that 😅 Had completely forgotten I had set the date for today, needless to say I was not ready 😂😂😂
Don't over stress. Producthunt gives a quick spike on traffic and subscriptions, it helps with the endorfins, but they won't decide the fate of your product.
Focus on your go-to-market strategy, the marketing, and listening to your early adopters. Once you are ready for your v2, you re-release on PH without screwing up the timezone ;-)
How much do you think Product Hunt, HN, etc weights? There are very few opportunities to put your product in front of a lot of people, the rest of the time is very hard to get any visibility...
At least you knew about the timing thing.
I was totally oblivious to it and just decided to randomly launch/go live on the spot.
Turned out it was 9:45 PM.
Still got 100+ upvotes though, but it could have been so much better.
Wow, 100+ upvotes before the day ended is kinda cool actually, and agreed with that upvote rate I'd bet launch could have gone better if timing was optimized. What's your product?
I totally feel you. my product Typogram was also out of rank the first few hours, hidden from the homepage on our product hunt launch. We end up being no.5 or 6 for product of the day thanks to our community. it was difficult pill to sowllow beause we did a ton of planning. details of what happened
it's hard getting Product of the Day after the first few hours being hidden. we are about to launch again on ph soon, so now I'm trying to figure out the strategy.
upvoted your product btw! : )
Thanks, Wentin! Yeah, at least now we can learn from our mistakes and make the next launch so much better. Appreciate your upvote! Followed your next launch as well!
thanks so much Alex!
sorry to hear that happened - I've heard people have success with contacting the producthunt team and asking for a re-do before 6 months.
But tbh, I would just build free tools and launch those (supported by MailMaestro)
Everyone in my network is incredibly fatigued of supporting ProductHunt DM'ers and Launchers. (Literally anything with a Producthunt link in it makes me suspicious these days.)
Imho, it's best to just launch free tools until one enthrals the PH community.
Thanks for your thoughts, Esus! Yeah, was lucky we were able to get in touch with the PH team and they got to fix our launch day.
Would you say doing a long-term pre-launch for free tools supported by our product is still worth it? Or would it be more of a quantity game?