thePenTool
Design assets for designers that value their time
thePenTool got one of the most prestigious Ukrainian design awards passing top studios with big project teams. I even got a "golden" trophy, which is a first for me!
Here's a pic of it: https://bit.ly/2Y82bGF
The look of this website is very important because core audience is designers. It's important to impress them and give a feel of a premium product, so I was glad that I was able to accomplished that.
On 5th of May I saw a huge-and I mean +4,500% huge-traffic spike on the analytics. Something was happening.
I immediately looked into acquisition report and saw a familiar website: muz.li. It's a pretty popular extension for designers from InVision as it replaces the new tab in your browser with interesting & inspiring stuff.
Getting featured on there was huge! I got 13k visitors and around 500 shares on social media. I thought that I need to capitalize on this as much as possible and quickly created a banner on top of the website with a coupon code for visitors from muz.li - that seemed to be a good call.
This was my second ever launch on PH. First one went very well and I got #1 Product of the day. I was aiming to repeat the success.
I prepared all the assets and waited for the proper time. When it came, I clicked "Post" and waited. thePenTool was gaining good amount of upvotes but didn't appear on the front page for some reason! Only when I scrolled to "yesterday" section I saw that I posted it literally seconds to early and it got put in the day that has already passed!
To say I was frustrated at myself is to not say anything, I immediately contacted PH support and explained my situation. I guess that happens often because the support guy (sorry, I don't remember your name!) moved it to "today" without no questions asked. My launch is saved!
So how did thePenTool do? Well, most of the day it was #2 but close to the end it got moved to #3. That's what it finished with - #3 Product of the Day. Do I think it would have done better didn't I mess up? Yes. Am I satisfied with the result? Also yes.
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Do you really think it makes a huge difference to be top #1,#2 or even #3 at the begining ?
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I do. First time I launched I immediately got to #1 and stayed there up until the end of the day. Seems like top 5-ish establishes at the start of the day (first few hours) and stays that way until the end, cause almost everyone that wanted to post that day already did and the higher the post is the more upvotes it gets from organic traffic
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If you support a launch only with organic PH users, it's plausible. However some projects seem to have an external audience to leverage (newsletter, twitter, what ever..) and tend to not be concerned by this rule.
At the end only PH knows.
On our side, we could only build a product that PH users love and try to be not some seconds to early with our launch 😅🙏🏻
Thanks for your point and feedback !
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Thanks for the tip! What timezone counted as yesterday?
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Sure! This should be helpful: https://whattimeisitatproducthunt.com
It displays Product Hunt's time, as soon as it hits 12:00 day resets. So launch when you see 12:00 but wait 20-30 seconds-ish more so you don't have to go through the same struggle I did :)
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Approximately 3 months in the making and the product was launched. Doing everything myself didn't make it easier, but this way I was able to control every single detail of the product and I love that!
The thing that made it even harder to launch was that besides the few design assets I had done in the past I've committed to creating two brand new paid assets to launch with so in addition to coming up with the strategy, branding, design, implementation, connecting a payment system and millions of other tasks I had to create two products. I'm glad that's done now!
By the way, the design I launched with is a v2. I've done a v1, coded it and then understood that it doesn't work at all, it's bad. So i redid everything from scratch at the point when I was pretty much ready for launch. Here's how it looked in v1: https://imgur.com/a/kbnvRR2
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