3 days from idea to Product Hunt launch and $720/- in sales

8 points

3 years ago

Last Thursday my co-founder and I were traveling to a startup event in San Francisco. We had just missed an event earlier in the week and I would have totally missed this one if not for him reminding me. I told Harish how this was a pain for us and others like us. Others like us needed to be at these startup events to be part of the ecosystem of the customer, founders, and investors.

Harish agreed that it was a pain and something we faced every day. We said why not "solve" it over it the weekend. Put it up on PH and see what happens.

We put together a simple Airtable. Harish would update with events coming up, and I would automate this with the calendar. We spent last weekend on it. I read a ton of articles on "How to" do a PH launch. I learned that Tue-Thu are good days to launch. Most of them suggested a 2-3 month prep. But we had given ourselves just that weekend to built and a day to launch. Also, we decided to hunt ourselves. We did not think this was big enough to ask someone to hunt for us.

We prepared the PH page, a Gumroad store to sell the calendar, and prepared a few paragraphs that we could post. At 12am on Monday (Tuesday morning) we launched on Product Hunt. Check it out here https://www.producthunt.com/posts/the-essential-founder-calendar

We had made a list of groups that would be active at different time zones. We started engaging those groups, some at 12 am, some early morning Tuesday, and some Morning to noon PST.

By the end of the day on Tuesday, we were at #16, got ~85 upvotes, and had 6 sales @$120/- per year. That's $720/-. Not bad I would say for a weekend of work. This was our first-ever PH launch and learning what it takes to launch made it worth the effort.

A few things we learned - If you want to try something out, just launch the damm thing - Launch on PH does not end with hitting the submit button it starts there, you let your network, groups, and individuals know you launched. You engage in discussions and you watch the action. Its a full day of work. - Hunters can really help push the needle for the first upvotes so they do matter a lot. But you can still launch without them. - You get votes and sales after the launch day too.