A couple of additional reflections based on comments / feedback on this post.
1. What (if anything) would we do differently?
This is a tough question, because I don’t think there’s a definitive playbook that guarantees a great organic launch.
On reflection, I’m not sure we’d change much. If anything, we might try to launch sooner; though in reality we pushed pretty hard to get to Show HN as quickly as we could with a product we actually believed in. Shipping earlier is always tempting in hindsight, but I’m not convinced it would have meaningfully changed the outcome for the better.
2. Why didn’t you use paid agencies for Product Hunt?
There does seem to be a bit of a pay-to-play dynamic if you’re aiming for the very top spots on Product Hunt, especially if you’re not already a large or well-known company.
I received a lot of inbound messages from people offering to promote our launch to “real people,” but that didn’t feel aligned with our goals and honestly felt like a poor use of time and money. I basically just ignored all of those emails and LinkedIn messages.
What we really wanted to test was whether the product itself resonated and to get genuine feedback from people discovering it organically and not to optimize for ranking for its own sake.
We may have sacrificed a higher ranking by doing it ourselves, but for our goals and our team it still felt like the right approach.
Always love reading about your journey!
Thanks, Hannah! Appreciate you saying that and reading / following along.
A couple of additional reflections based on comments / feedback on this post.
1. What (if anything) would we do differently?
This is a tough question, because I don’t think there’s a definitive playbook that guarantees a great organic launch.
On reflection, I’m not sure we’d change much. If anything, we might try to launch sooner; though in reality we pushed pretty hard to get to Show HN as quickly as we could with a product we actually believed in. Shipping earlier is always tempting in hindsight, but I’m not convinced it would have meaningfully changed the outcome for the better.
2. Why didn’t you use paid agencies for Product Hunt?
There does seem to be a bit of a pay-to-play dynamic if you’re aiming for the very top spots on Product Hunt, especially if you’re not already a large or well-known company.
I received a lot of inbound messages from people offering to promote our launch to “real people,” but that didn’t feel aligned with our goals and honestly felt like a poor use of time and money. I basically just ignored all of those emails and LinkedIn messages.
What we really wanted to test was whether the product itself resonated and to get genuine feedback from people discovering it organically and not to optimize for ranking for its own sake.
We may have sacrificed a higher ranking by doing it ourselves, but for our goals and our team it still felt like the right approach.