Ask HN: How did you launch your product? - palakz
======
csallen
I launched Indie Hackers
([https://www.indiehackers.com](https://www.indiehackers.com)) a few weeks ago
on HN. To make the site, I worked with about 12 different founders to decide
on formatting; come up with questions; and ultimately conduct, edit, and
publish interviews.

I waited to post on a Thursday morning, partly because I didn't want to
compete with tons of new stories on a Monday/Tuesday, and partly because I
wanted to launch as early as possible and I knew the MVP was basically done.

I let the founders I worked with know I'd be posting on HN, and they were
eager to jump in the thread and answer questions that people had about their
companies. I think this made the thread a lot more engaging. I also think the
interviews themselves really resonated with people on HN, because they have a
very "Ask HN" feel to them.

The thread ended up being on the front page of HN for about 36 hours, and
stayed in the top 1-3 spots for most of that, finishing with 971 upvotes.
(link to HN comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425))
I got about 100,000 pageviews on Thursday and 60,000 on Friday. Someone
submitted it to ProductHunt on Sunday morning, where it stayed at #1 all day
and got about 20,000 pageviews.

That was 3 weeks ago. Today the site has gotten 283,000 pageviews total. Daily
traffic is around 2-3k pageviews (30-50x lower than it was on launch day).
I've added a blog, more than doubled the number of interviews, and I'm working
on adding a forum. I've also added two sponsors, from whom I've made about
$600 total so far.

~~~
Guyag
Would love a RSS feed for the blog

~~~
csallen
Yep, it's on the way! I've got a question for you, as someone who doesn't use
RSS feeds personally. Does it matter to you whether or not the full content of
the post is included in the feed? Also, what RSS reader do you use?

~~~
AussieCoder
I think an RSS feed would be great too. I use Digg Reader and just headlines,
or headlines and key facts (revenue, founders, etc.) would be fine.

------
KajMagnus
Launch failure story here.

I posted to Reddit and Hacker news about the software I had built, but this
didn't attract much attention. Largely because the software wasn't so very
usable to anyone — I had mostly built something that mainly I liked. Which I
didn't realize at that time.

Then I wrote a blog post related to the software, and it got popular here at
HN, and topped the HN list for a short while. Lots of visitors to the website,
and a few (like 5? 10?) people signed up and started using my software.

But what I had built was hard to use, so the few people who tested it, quickly
abandoned it. I had not done much usability testing, at that time, and didn't
realize how important good UX design is (UX design = user experience design).

Eventually I shut down the startup company (it was just me), and got a job
instead.

But I continued working with the same software, on my spare time. And
redesigned everything. Now it's soon time to launch again :-) And this time
I've hired usability testers and UX designers and asked them for help and
feedback about how to make everything (the software & website) more UX
friendly.

I hope this'll be helpful to someone :-) I.e. to ask UX designers about
feedback, on both the website and software, before launching. I found the UX
designers at a freelancer site. Some of them are _really_ talented (from my
point of view), whilst others might instead make things worse.

~~~
le-mark
I had a similar launch and lack of interest, plus people signed up, and never
returned. Did you engage the users that did signup in any way? Did you get
positive feedback while on hacker news that led you to believe the product is
viable? How has you experience been with ux designers and testers been? Heck,
do you have a blog I could read about this stuff? :)

My project got very little feedback, just kinda nothing but a lot of page
views and about 35 signups out 3,000 page views over 3 months. No activity
from those that did signup, very discouraging.

~~~
KajMagnus
Hi, Do you have a link to your project? (I have a link to mine in my profile)

\- I didn't engage the users that signed up in any way, no.

\- On HackerNews and other places, I got mixed feedback. I think I a bit
ignored the feedback that said that what I built wasn't so very user friendly.

\- My experience with UX designers and testers have been good, or great. Some
of them were not of much help, but that doesn't matter much — what matters is
that _some_ of the freelancers were really talented (from my point of view). I
hired perhaps 10 different freelancers, they charged between $5 and $35 per
hour. Usually the a bit more expensive ones were better. I got the impression
that the freelancers where doing their best and working fairly quickly. (The
freelancer site has a time tracker that takes screenshots.)

\- Usability testing: This works fairly well with almost anyone. They recorded
screencasts with sound. Problems could be that the sound was a bit low. Or the
video didn't work. Then instead they wrote something in text. — I think it
makes sense to let both 1) experienced UX designers and 2) people with not
much experience, test the software. Someone who didn't know anything about
tech, was actually very helpful, because she made it easier for me to
understand how to write so that also non-tech users understand.

\- The biggest problem with usability testing, was that it takes rather long
to watch the videos afterwards :- P If they spend 30 min recording, then it
takes 30 mins for me to watch. Sometimes it's more time efficient with
feedback in text + screenshots in a PDF/LibreOffice doc.

\- No blog, but I've thought about writing a blog post entitled "Doing
everything the wrong way" or something like that. (I did other mistakes too.
Perhaps I still do :- P )

(sorry for the late reply, didn't notice the new comments here)

------
stevesearer
I launched Office Snapshots
([https://officesnapshots.com](https://officesnapshots.com)) just over 9 years
ago by telling a few friends, who then posted to twitter, who then posted to
digg where it made the homepage several times.

Launching was much easier than the following 9 years spent creating and
growing a real business out of what was essentially an internet curiosity.

------
mtmail
We do geocoding using open data sources
[https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/](https://geocoder.opencagedata.com/) and
launched the product at the annual OpenStreetMap conference. Many people from
the industry approached us, some blog posts, nothing really customer focused.
We were sponsors of the conference and now corporate members of the
OpenStreetMap foundation. We're listed in a couple of API-related directories
but never made an effort to get as many links out as possible. We skipped
product hunt. Our blog is regularly featured on other OpenStreetMap related
blogs [http://blog.opencagedata.com/](http://blog.opencagedata.com/) It's a
niche really, not many companies need geocoding at scale.

~~~
mapster
What was your pitch in the early days? Has the consumer changed or is this
service part of another larger Sass?

------
adibalcan
We launch online products (like [https://feedcheck.co](https://feedcheck.co) )
with very limited budget. So, our PR campaign contains:

submissions to many startups directories starting discussions on Facebook
startup groups blogs articles

