A launch, 100+ users and 1000+ visitors later

I'm not making up the numbers. The launch was as fantastic as the reactions to Monitoro were unexpected.

I mainly launched on Producthunt, and added Monitoro to a few software registries to get some precious backlinks. As a support kinda, a plan B - a weak one that is.

The surprise was at it's height when I woke up this morning to see my first 10 users, which kept building up during the day to a solid 115 users on day one, less than 24 hours after the launch.

It went fine. My stress and fear of it crashing was not justified after all. There was actually a critical bug report from a brave user which saved the day, and allowed me to land a fix quickly. Staying true to demos and launch day curses.

The launch was smooth and buttery otherwise. I monitored (sic) the infrastructure while people were signing up, which quickly hit my sendgrid email limit. One credit card swipe later, that issue was also gone and no business was disrupted.

The learnings?

Honestly, not so much. I have no insight into launching that I could share. I have read in the past articles about coordinating launches, and pinging all your network to be on standby for that magical moment. I skipped that, and frantically clicked the "Launch" button in ProductHunt.

I don't know why it worked to the extent it did. I did nothing special, I have made launches before that have tanked.

Maybe one practical tip I could share is:
Once you're in the front page of a traffic source like product hunt or HN, you're a fool if you update anything and it goes down for 2 minutes or 3. At the peak of the traffic, I calculated that having the website down for 2 minutes would cost me 50 visitors and 1 signup.

In practice it means, get your stuff together before you click launch. Once you're there, do not do anything.

Next steps?

I've written a personal email to all the users who signed up, hoping to strike a conversation with them and talk about their motivations and their needs. Let's see how that goes.

On a separate topic, due to the freeze of today, I couldn't fix some important (but not critical) issues I noticed in Monitoro only after I launched.

I will be doing that now that the heat has calmed down from the launch.

Thank you for the time you took to read this update.