Keysmith

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 🙃

Somehow someone from Softpedia found Keysmith and wrote a review. It was so quick I thought it was just a bot at first, but this person actually went through the app, understood what it could do, and wrote an honest review!

"Remarkably intuitive"

"Incredibly versatile and easy to use"

5/5 Stars + Editor's Pick!

Whaaaaaat!

I checked their other reviews to see if they just give 5 stars to every app, but it's actually pretty uncommon.

It feels like I got an A+ and some nice comments from the teacher on an assignment I worked really hard on.

We're up to 2 sales now... one more and we get to celebrate, at least according to @louisswiss 😜

We got an email last night, someone thanking us for building Keysmith and suggesting a couple features they'd like to see.

That in and of itself was a surprise – we haven't really posted about this much, still just showing friends and getting their feedback.

Turns out they had found Keysmith earlier that day and purchased a license!

Something I'm really proud of is how our trial version is set up – you get the full product with no time limit, just a limit on the number of shortcuts you can create at once.

So the fact that someone actually bought it means they experienced the product as it is today and found it valuable enough to purchase a license!

Amazing. Hopefully they'll be open to chatting with us and helping us better understand how they found us and what they're using it for so we can further clarify our value proposition and target market.

We're doing some testing with friends, and most of them have been great for getting actionable feedback. (In other words, things don't work as expected, aren't clear, etc, and we go and fix them.)

It's been a bit of a slog. Useful, but also painful and kind of embarrassing.

This time, the user tried something, and it just worked. And it was SO AWESOME to see and hear his reaction. It was a small problem that was really annoying (he has two bluetooth headphones and switches between them often) and he was overjoyed to have a solution to that problem.

That added some much needed fuel to my tank. It's great to see someone delighted with something I've put so much thought and effort into. And it gives me hope that other people will find it useful too.

On January 1st, 2020, we started work on an app called Otto.

The vision for Otto is pretty big, so we thought we'd start with a smaller product that we had mostly already built the tech for.

After six months of work, we've completed our MVP for what we're calling Keysmith.

It's been a great learning experience for me already. I've learned a lot and gained experience doing product, design, and customer development.

Now it's time to dive in and learn marketing!