Presspool

We spent the last few weeks polishing up the UI, fixing bugs, adding features, and roadmapping for Presspool in preparation for a launch on ProductHunt. Today is the day! There's even a video tour, including my face and voice 🤯

This is our first time doing a ProductHunt launch, it's been interesting!

...for the last couple of weeks. After spending a lot of time last year on Playdate games, we're reengaging with Presspool. We're working on a new app UI, new features, updated marketing site, expanding the roadmap, and maybe a ProductHunt launch soon. Exciting times!

A few weeks ago, we launched our initial landing page. It was intentionally scrappy - just a headline and some words from the founders to rally like-minded folks to our cause. We shared it in a few places, but didn't get a ton of traction.

We asked one of our friends for some marketing advice and he had a ton of great ideas for us, including:

1. Tighten up the headline

He really liked the "distraction-free reading experience" angle, so we tried to highlight that a bit more.

2. Add screenshots / videos

If you have ~8 seconds (or whatever the actual number is) to hook someone, long-form text won't do it. That approach might be more feasible once we have a more established audience, but it's not great for a cold start. Screenshots and videos are much more enticing.

3. Show a sample issue

He was originally lukewarm on the concept, but when we shared a link to a sample issue, he said "This is actually really cool!" We were already planning to do this, but his reaction caused us to move it up in our priority list.

4. Provide more context about who we are and what we do

We're planning to build a mix of SaaS products, games, and maybe physical products in the future. That means we'll need to build an audience beyond a single vertical. He suggested that we add a footer with links to some of the other projects we've worked on.

We launched the new iteration of our landing page this morning. Let us know what you think in the comments!

We figured that if we're making a product in the newsletter space, we should probably publish a newsletter :) Presspool is targeted at the consumer, but we still want to make sure we're a good player for newsletter producers. A bonus: we're trying out Revue which we haven't yet tested against the Presspool codebase.

We cajoled a friend and marketing expert to meet with us and give feedback on our landing page, value prop, copy and the product in general. We learned a lot, and got some confirmation of things we were already thinking. The main take away: our MVP landing page is just too M and thus not V.

We have building behind-the-scenes for the last month or so to make sure we actually got value out of using this product. But now we're ready to get some feedback on our messaging and positioning, and hopefully a couple of beta testers.

If you're someone who subscribes to a lot of newsletters, check it out.