contentable.ai

We finally launched on product hunt after many nights of planning, changing our landing page multiple times & constantly updating the app in preparation for launch.

Key Takeaways
121 upvotes
Daily Rank: #14
119 Signups on launch day : We added ~30 users due to product hunt
Indirect feedback: Google analytics showed users tried a lot of features including fine tuning a model 🕺
Direct Feedback from comments : Not a lot TBH

We launched in the evening and we went full throttle with our posts on various platforms. We sent messages on linkedin, Indie Hackers & other communities we are part of. This got us some traction for the first few hours. The first 4 hours are also the ones where we cannot see our rank on the dashboard. We made a crucial mistake where our product was marked as pre launch instead of launched. We changed it when we realised it after an hour.

We got a lot of congratulatory messages from other product builders. We were keen to get feedback but most comments till now were just congratulatory.

We started monitoring our google analytics and we could see a lot of users trying out our features. The click events for the functions we have started coming in and we were very excited to see our hard work being put to use.

The rest of the night was spent in monitoring the traffic and replying to comments. it was exciting to see our product rank up to #12 and then go back down to #14 ☹️. We went to sleep but we woke up every hour to check and make sure all systems were ok.

Few users spent some time to try out and give us some good actionable feedback. But it was only 2 users. We expected a lot more feedback as these are our users but thus is the nature of launches on PH. Something is better than nothing and we definitely started

The day after the launch has mostly been analysing the traffic, analytics & logs. We are seeing a lot of value from the click events. These are helping us figure out how we can improve our product.

What has been the most exciting insight you got for your product after launch?

Hi Indie hackers family,

We have been grinding at our product in preparation for the launch on product hunt. In a month we have had 100+ users. We want more users to try out and get value from what we have built.

We need your support on Product Hunt. Please try it out here and let us know your thoughts: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/contentable-ai

Your support on this journey has been immensely helpful and we look forward to more encouragement & support.

Since our launch, we have consistently been talking to our users and trying to improve our product. We built our product with developers in mind but realised anyone could use it. Since our initial user was developer our UX was a bit complex and TBH its UX/UI is hard and we are still learning every day.

We pivoted a bit to simplify our prompt comparison playground. Now you can get 6-9 outputs from various models in few clicks in one screen. We made a quick loom video explaining this amazing usecase. This usecase is crucial for social media content generation where you would like multiple outputs from AI models before posting to your feed.

We internally used a similar prompt for generating our PH first comment using contentable.ai

Give it a try and let us know how you go.

We are a pre product market fit SAAS solution and we clearly felt that when we changed our hero tagline 4 times in 1 day when preparing for our product hunt launch. No amount of YC videos can prepare you for this reality of startups.

We did this for launching on product hunt and in preparation for demo day at the incubator program we are part of.

Sharing what we have done so far for product hunt

1. Spoke to some early users and got the insight that we need to simplify our UX. Users found it to be a bit technical. We are developers and we designed it for developers but even developers were struggling. When we saw that we pushed out an update with a simplified UI. We added an advanced button for users who want to try something more advanced.

2. We decided on the showcase example for our images on product hunt. This is crucial for us since we are an AI startup. We decided on something with Mr Beast 😉. We are hoping Mr Beast will retweet it.

3. Lots of time spent on canva designing the images. The attention span on product hunters is really small as there are so many cool products to browse through. Our product being a technical product we had to cut sections of the UI to display the features of the product. Free version of canva was really handy. Make sure to use image frames in canva to make your life easy working with images.

4. Once the images were sorted we had to update our video on youtube. We used the software screen studio which we paid for. Its totally worth the money spent as it zooms in on the right sections on the screen and makes it easy for us to explain our product without even talking about it. One thing to note in screen studio is the move movements can be too distracting. You have to consciously slow down your mouse movement when recording the video.

The video took more than 6 takes to get it right with the right amount of mouse movement and zoom in's.

5. Once the video was ready, we had to prepare the content for our first comment on product hunt. This content needs to share the problem you are solving with the product and should allow users to interact with the launch. We used our own product (contentable.ai)[https://www.contentable.ai] for this step. We generated 6 outputs from 3 models in one click. We compared all the outputs and decided the one we liked. We edited it a little and copied it to product hunt

6. After that was the hard part of deciding the day to launch. We asked the various AI models on (contentable chat mode)[https://www.contentable.ai] and found that all 3 FOG models (Facebook, Open AI and Google) agreed that tuesday and wednesdays are the best days for product hunt launches. Getting validation from all 3 models in one screen with 1 click is good relief.

7. We hit schedule and now we are anxiously waiting to launch on tuesday the 10th October 🚀 🤞🏽

Before the launch date, we plan on interacting with the product hunters and providing authentic feedback to builders hoping it would be reciprocated.

Let us know if we missed anything and is there something you would have done differently for PH launch?

The excitement of launching something is a massive adrenaline rush. I had such a rush and I reached out to members of a slack group called AI exchange. I got a strike for this outreach, as I messaged 5/6 members requesting if its ok for me to share my product for feedback. I was mindful to not spam directly with link but a few I did do it as I thought I had provided value to them in the past. 🤦🏽‍♂️

I got the dreaded message from the moderator/community manager asking me to refrain from doing so. He asked me to share it in the dedicated channel named "promote-your-work". I had posted my update there but I think promote has a negative connotation to it. Users do not interact with the channel with that name at all. We are at a stage where we just want feedback so we can grow and improve. Getting the feedback has been hard especially for developers like us who are not really good at self promotion or marketing. I apologised to the community manager and I even reached out individually to the 5/6 members and apologised to them for the outreach. Three strikes and I would be ostracised from the community 😢 This was strike one.

In the same community, there are a lot of consultants who seem to have cracked the code at meeting the guidelines and still be able to promote their work indirectly. They run regular jam session to share their knowledge about consulting pricing, negotiations and create value in the community, thus promoting their own work as consultants. I think the key thing to learn from this incident is "creating value". The consultants create value and it explains the big bucks they demand as daily rates 💰. Seeing them in action in the slack community was a massive learning curve for a first time indie hacker like me.

I am now trying to be a better community member and trying to create value by sharing my learnings from the experience as I am doing here

Please do share if you faced similar issues when you got too excited like me and started reaching out to peers and got blocked. Any pointers will help us avoid making the same mistakes ⛔️ 🙏🏽

We launched contentable.ai this week. We realised pretty soon that we targeted a broad market by building all the features we could think of. We realised our USP was our model comparison playground where users could compare all the available models and the performance of their prompts. We updated our landing page at the end of the day to reflect the same. It felt like we did a pivot right after launch 😄

We have been reaching out to probable customers by emailing or messaging them. This is the process we have been following.

1. Before launch we collated a list of likely users/early adopters in a google sheet who we could reach out to for feedback. We captured what their interests were and what we knew about them. We had to personalise the message to make sure we got their valuable attention.

2. We tried our own medicine for cold emails. We used contentable to create the opening introductory line for cold emails and we compared the output across GPT 3 vs GPT 4 vs Google. Sharing it here for fellow indie hackers, you can edit the example based on your cold email process. #shamelessplug

https://app.contentable.ai/playground/6506542a4790bc666f7ef724

We found that palm API was hallucinating a bit but the content was casual and relevant. GPT 3 and 4 were giving different outputs based on the recipient. They say every model has its own love language and we realised that right away when we compared the outputs

3. We added multiple leads and their interests as scenarios and started creating the first drafts of our cold emails. We mixed and match based on the outputs which resonated with us. We used the opening lines as first draft and then built the email content for each user we reached out.

4. We hit send and now we are waiting anxiously to get some traffic and some feedback from early users 🤞🏽

We will keep sharing our journey as we launch and grow our indie product ❤️