Weekly Update: Product Hunt Flopped, Now Going Direct

The launch

Launched Dokly (https://www.producthunt.com/products/dokly) on Product Hunt this week. It flopped.

No viral moment. No surge of signups. Just me refreshing the page hoping for upvotes that didn't come.

What Dokly is

A documentation platform for SaaS products. Think Mintlify/GitBook alternative. You sign up, get a subdomain (yourproduct.dokly.co), write MDX docs in a browser editor, and get a live doc site instantly.

Why I'm not upset

Honestly? I don't have feature parity with the big players yet. Launching on PH was probably premature. Mintlify has years of polish. I have a few months of nights and weekends.

What's next

Changing strategy. Instead of hoping for viral distribution, I'm going direct.

This week I'm reaching out to indie hackers building API products and dev tools - people who clearly need docs but haven't set them up yet. Offering free Pro access in exchange for feedback.

If you're building something that needs documentation and want to try Dokly for free, please email me at hello@dokly.co.

The hard part

I work a full-time job. This is evenings and weekends only. Plus I am preparing for an exam so right now I am just able to give it few hours on the weekend.

Some weeks I ship features. Some weeks I'm too burnt to open VS Code. Progress is slow but it's still progress. Right now, shipping features is not the priority, getting noticed is.

Not complaining - just being honest about the constraints. If you're in the same boat, you know what I mean.

This week's focus

- Outreach to 10-15 qualified founders

- Get 3-5 people actually using the product

- Collect feedback on what's missing

Shipping features is easy. Getting people to care is the hard part.

Building in public because accountability helps. If you've gone through a failed PH launch and bounced back, I'd love to hear how.