Show IH: How to fail miserably on Product Hunt, HN and here
Straight to the point:
- Build a low effort side project in like 10 hours. The goal is to try and market the main product. Offer little to no value
- Rush to launch by making logos and images with Canva that makes no sense to the actual product. Submit ASAP: time is running, you can't launch to success past 10 hours in the day
- Do nothing. You get nothing. Be sad you didn't get anything (and still do nothing)
- Realize the tagline should be one sentence by reaching out to PH team and literally asking "Why my product has no votes?"
- Now read how to launch on PH results from Google, only now. Lazily Tweet as a last resort because you're shy of reaching out to your close contacts because your votes are miserable
- Try to get points on the internet and claps on Medium by sharing your failure. #CelebrateFailure
- Don't do this.
It was 8th Product of the day, counting from the last I mean.
Edit: since this post is on front page - check out this free hosting, domain, website, email... post link (not mine & no catch & I'm using it) You're welcome.
Unless your target market is developers or fellow founders, why should HN or Product Hunt upvotes even matter except as a vanity metric?
Hey @danjac that is a really good point. I guess though, you could say that with this community we are all early adopters here so if your idea doesn't work here then maybe - to some degree - that doesn't really bode well for a release to the general population, or maybe something like that?
If I'm building something aimed at, say, expat ESL teachers, then hacker/founder sites such as Product Hunt or Hacker News are utterly irrelevant. I'd do better finding whatever Facebook Groups or forums expat ESL teachers hang out in and plugging my product there. The concern is people who spend time and effort on PH or HN to achieve some vanity metric that does nothing to sell their product to their target audience.
Fellow founders are our future community members. I built this side project for two things:
Points for trying and sharing your lessons with us though! Gave you an upvote on PH and here :)
Thank you so much.
We live in a world where failure is celebrated. Indie hackers shouldn't be too chicken to fail, instead fail hard, fail fast and learn from it.
On the bright side, 26 PH votes isn't that bad, considering you admitted to not doing enough outreach to drive up your votes.
Anyway, you only told us about PH but don't leave us hanging 😃 ... how did your campaign perform on HN and IH 😊? Lessons learned?
I wished no one will ask this. A lot more miserable than PH.
HN got 1 point i.e. me and I don't know if it got me any visits because I didn't integrate analytics in this rush.
IH post is here, a product update with 2 votes (1 is me).
To do the opposite is what I learned, shared in a comment below as well.
Did not get it, should it be well polished and well planned launch? or MVP and build as you go?
To do the opposite is what I learned.
Thanks, @Dinakar,
I'm planning to do a proper launch of my product on PH if I get at least 3 recurring users, then I move it from alpha to beta. The insight is great, especially on tweets scheduling and analytics - I didn't have that yet.
For Docu Sign right? DM me on Twitter, I'll help you out. I'm testing the waters of PH with this product to prep our Community launch.
It is for https://proofdash.com/ . The DocuSign blockchain is a concept I'm running to learn Ethereum solidity. https://proofdash.com/ is what I'm pushing more right now. Following you on Twitter. We'll chat more.
That got way more upvotes than what I published to Product Hunt, and we had put 500+ hours into our project by that point. :(
Sorry. Is that Buy Localized?
What did you do on your launch day? Sometimes there might be a other big launches on that day, leaving us less room to compete.
Jus tweeted and emailed out, think we got half a dozen upvotes total.
Maybe the size of the list or the relevancy with your audience had to do something with this.
But you know PH is not all, there are so many different ways to acquire different customers.