(Unexpectedly) Launched on Product Hunt 😬

Oh boy.

So a couple weeks ago we did a mini-launch on Reddit. Someone liked it enough to post it to Product Hunt, but we weren't ready, so we asked them to take it down. Turns out you can't delete your own post, so we had to email PH to get it down.

Friday rolls around and it happens again. So we asked again. Here's what they said:

Users are encouraged to hunt interesting products on Product Hunt, but we also understand that makers may want to wait to launch products themselves for the best possible launch.

I've removed this post, but I'm afraid we won't be able to prevent other users posting Keysmith in the future.

I'd recommend beginning to schedule a launch for Keysmith on Product Hunt to prevent others from launching Keysmith before you're ready to launch.

So, naturally, I went ahead and scheduled a launch. I set it for the farthest ahead in the future I could: Friday, August 28th at 6am.

Thursday rolls around and around 3pm I get a reminder to push back or cancel the launch.

Guess what? You can't.

Once you've scheduled, you have to post. You can change within the original one week timeline, but that's it. There's no cancel.

So, no Tuesday launch. No big name hunter.

We tried to make the most of it, but we were definitely not ready for it. We pushed an update to the website, made some GIFs, and invited friends to a FB event (that way the people who I thought would be most likely to support would definitely see it, rather than leaving it up to the FB newsfeed algorithm).

I was up till 4am getting everything together.

I read somewhere that it's better to post earlier in the day because more people will see it and you'll get votes from a global audience, so around 3:30 I decided to just pull the trigger.

When I woke up around 8:30 we had about 20 upvotes and had been pushed way down on the "new" page by other products.

I didn't realize how busy PH is!

Fortunately we were able to make the front page, and we're now up to 7th place with about 100 votes. We're not far from 6th, but it's a long way to cracking the top 5.

It's been a wild 24 hours.

Getting support from friends definitely helped.

It was really heartwarming to see support from people I've interacted with on IndieHackers and Twitter (hi @dardang! 😃). A few people I've never met IRL retweeted, and I felt touched by that.

It sounds kinda silly, being touched by a retweet, but that's how I felt! ¯\(ツ)/¯

Anyways, thanks for following along my journey today.

Oh! A couple suggestions for anyone who made it this far:

1. There's an official How to Launch on Product Hunt post by the folks at Product Hunt. Every word is worth reading, but the biggest misconception I had was that you'd be punished for linking directly to your post, and it was better to tell people to go to producthunt.com and find your post that way. Not true.

2. Adding a discount for Product Hunters made a huge difference for us. We didn't do that until someone posted this:

Not the friendliest message. My co-founder's first response was this -> http://bash.org/?4281

We figured Sue is probably not gonna buy a license even with a discount, but we gave it a shot anyway and added a 30% off discount and mentioned so in a banner.

It took 7 minutes from the time we shipped that change to getting our first purchase, and we've had 5 in the last hour!

So we owe Sue a big thanks. Highly recommend adding a discount.

Okay, that's our story for today.

If you'd like to check it out, our post on product hunt is still live at https://www.producthunt.com/posts/keysmith-3/

I'm going to take a nap now 🙃