Screenbreak

We launched on Product Hunt on Friday the 13th (bold move :p)
He managed to stay on the front page (around 7th place), which was quite cool (and has some after effects the following days).

Observations:

1. Not as much engagement on comment section vs HN
2. Less sign ups vs impact of HN

Still a great boost in sing ups vs regular word of mouth growth, with signs of some heavy users joining.

Still growth is about getting feedback and nailing the ideal persona of a user. Our product has wide usecases, which is both good and bad.

While we got a couple of donations when we launched on HN, we just hit our first sale, an order for a paperback in Canada.
Feels great but tbh the excitement didn't last long. We are both committed full time with a huge opportunity cost, so we need to keep the engine running, understanding our user better and finding the right fit.

Yesterday we launched Screenbreak on Hacker News and got to the front page! Overall it resulted in 4,000 pageviews and almost 250 new signups. Here are three lessons I learned:

1. Don't overthink getting out there. Your product won't be perfect and that's ok
2. Be active. I was unprepared for what happened, which was a 10hr session of multitasking (at least I have a poker background so that helped :p)
3. Was expecting more haters, but community was actually super nice. People reached out for help and support, share best practices and knowledge. Was awesome!

It gave us so much energy and input, super critical.

It took us 5 months, but we are finally done building the minimum viable product for Screenbreak. Or what we believed was an MVP (maybe we overbuilt, quite common). However we want to show something that could potentially delight and the technical challenges behind it were quite complex.
As a side note, we hired 5 contractors project-based to support us throughout the process.
Learning: You can find very skilled people if you do proper research online/freelance markerplaces, I was actually impressed with their engagement and dedication.

@yorgos idea was pretty challenging from a tech perspective.

• "OK, let's take the web pages content and put them in a nice PDF! Pretty straight forward, huh?"
• "Wait boy! Is not that easy! You have to done that right. Paywalls, ads, clutter, hidden objects, html/css anomalies, image resolutions, quotes detection, author name, article date/title/description."
• "Oh! Crap! That's too much to handle! Let's power up some Python tools! Beautifulsoup is my first friend, Weasyprint is my second one! Done!"
• "Wait! Some articles look off boy!"
• "Sure! Let's put some Machine Learning in the code! Oh, crap, it's too early! See you soon! :-)"

It took me a month or so to successfully pitch Screenbreak to @nikalexis but thankfully we got there. Nikos is an extremely talented engineer and having him onboard was critical for the being able to build a scalable solution for Screenbreak.
A rough prototype I had made + a lot of high level discussion about the mission and we were both full-time hands on.
Extremely pumped to share this journey

Being locked down with plenty of time in my hands, I clearly noticed a problem that I faced and also felt passionate about tackling.

• Excessive screen time in our day-to-day
• Diminishing attention spans

It was consistently tough to properly read quality longform content online. From screen related tiredness to having ads and notifications pop up and demand a share of my attention, my focus was compromised.

Long story short, I wanted to read longform content that lives online (and there is a ton of high quality out there), in an inherent offline medium, paper :p