Adventurekeep

On Tuesday, I posted adventurekeep.com to Show Hacker News (you can see the post here). I went in with the goal of getting approximately the same number of sign ups that I got from my Reddit launch a few days before.

However, to my elated surprise, the post hit the front page of Hacker News and stayed there for most of the day!

Over the next 24 hours, I received over 5,000 visitors to my site and received nearly 600 sign ups! I also received tons of great feedback and comments from people saying they're excited about my application.

In my mind, this puts me solidly in "product validated" territory. People certainly seem to be interested. Now to follow up on their interest and give them an even better experience moving forward!

Post Mortem

I tailored the language of my post a bit more towards the audience I was looking to reach. My reddit launch was targeted at RPG subreddits so I could assume certain knowledge about D&D. However, I knew there would be a broader audience that may not be (quite) as familiar with the tabletop game. So I described more generally what the application does.

Since it was Hacker News, I talked a bit more about how I built the site and where I drew inspiration

Conclusion

Overall, I'm over the moon with how the Hacker News launch went. To be honest, I didn't think I would ever post to HN since I've seen some content on their get eaten alive by commenters. I posted on a whim and am very glad I did.

A question to the rest of you: how does this compare to your launches on Hacker News. Anything you did differently or stories you'd like to share?

Over the weekend, I posted my new product, Adventurekeep on several tabletop gaming subreddits. Over that Sunday and the following Monday, I received 215 visitors, 72 of which signed up for an account and at least checked out the app.

None of them signed up for the paid plan, but this seems pretty good in terms of market validation? What have you all experienced in similar launch conditions? Is this response typical?

I spent a fair amount of time crafting my post (which you can see here, and getting feedback from friends and family.

Overall, I received 22 upvotes. Which isn’t taking the world by storm but I’m proud of my start!

Post-Mortem

I think the included gifs really helped visualize what I was trying to describe. And engaging with commenters and quickly addressing feedback I think helped people trust what I was showing them.

I also received several emails with great feedback and feature requests. Time to get busy!

Conclusion

In conclusion, I think I had a pretty decent start. But I’d like to hear what you all think as far as how well this reddit post did compared to others’ experiences.