The Story of How 3 Product Hunt UX Bugs Derailed My Product Launch

[panphora]

This was a painful blog post to write. I spent so much time and effort preparing for a big launch day that, when it failed, it was devastating. I got kinda depressed and felt like I couldn't keep going for weeks.

I had put 6 months into marketing and hired 5 freelancers (which I honestly couldn't afford) to help me with copywriting, marketing, and outreach — and then I made a couple mistakes that erased a lot of that effort and made two of my Product Hunt launches fail!

I wrote this post so other people could learn from my mistakes and get some insight into all the nuts and bolts behind a Product Hunt launch, so they can be more successful than I was.

How 3 Product Hunt UX Bugs Derailed My Product Launch

Let me begin by saying I love Product Hunt. There's nothing else like it. Hacker News is too harsh. Reddit discourages self-promotion in 90% of its subreddits. Indie Hackers has too much self-promotion. In all this noise, Product Hunt is an oasis of pure, early-startup excitement about, well...

blog.remaketheweb.com

 

[Talia]

That was a rather painful read - certainly not because of your writing, which was great, but because of your experience. Seems like Product Hunt has some things to straighten out... I'm glad to hear your second product (which looks pretty interesting) had a successful launch in spite of that.

 

[panphora]

Thank you, I really appreciate you checking it out! It was a very painful experience, but I've learned a lot for it — mostly, just to check with someone else before I click "Save" 😂 I hope PH gives me a relaunch — that would be very cool

 

[Adam]

Thanks for sharing @panphora! Some valuable lessons there. I have had a couple of features on PH but have yet to try Ship.

 

[panphora]

Thank you for reading @Adam. I'd definitely recommend Ship — a great value for the early traction. I think it can make a lot of difference on launch day (unfortunately I haven't gotten the opportunity to prove that out yet!)

 

[tom]

Thank you very much @panphora for this summary. I'll have my product launch in mid 2020 too and this helps me a lot, really good information you put in there! I hope everything is going well now with your products.

 

[blaq]

This was a painful blog post to write. I spent so much time and effort preparing for a big launch day that, when it failed, it was devastating. I got kinda depressed and felt like I couldn't keep going for weeks.

I had put 6 months into marketing and hired 5 freelancers (which I honestly couldn't afford) to help me with copywriting, marketing, and outreach — and then I made a couple mistakes that erased a lot of that effort and made two of my Product Hunt launches fail!

I wrote this post so other people could learn from my mistakes and get some insight into all the nuts and bolts behind a Product Hunt launch, so they can be more successful than I was.

How 3 Product Hunt UX Bugs Derailed My Product Launch

Let me begin by saying I love Product Hunt. There's nothing else like it. Hacker News is too harsh. Reddit discourages self-promotion in 90% of its subreddits. Indie Hackers has too much self-promotion. In all this noise, Product Hunt is an oasis of pure, early-startup excitement about, well...

blog.remaketheweb.com

thanks for sharing im checking out your app and im quite amazed on how your working with json file and updating it in realtime

 

[panphora]

Thank you, I really appreciate the support!

@blaq Let me know if you play around with it more. I'd be willing to answer any questions you have about Remake or even do a call to explain some of it to you :)

 

[blaq]

hey i watched you tutorial and i like how easy it seemed looking to try it out and see if i can build something cool for teams but what i did not understand were the deployment and users signups

 

[panphora]

Hey @blaq,

So the first thing to know is that Remake isn't optimized for sharing edit access among multiple users. That means, if you create a todo list or document, you can edit it yourself and share a read-only copy with anyone you want -- and Remake is perfect for this out of the box -- but if you want to give edit access for your todos or document to someone else, Remake doesn't support this yet.

This is something on the roadmap and I'm thinking about it a lot. If you still want to build a team productivity app, Remake might still be a good fit simply because it's so fast to get a prototype up with. You can always add multi-user access later after you've proven the MVP is something customers want.

For deployment: Remake is just a Node.js app. And it requires a persistent disk. So, you can deploy it yourself to something like Digital Ocean or any other VPS provider. But, it also comes with a FREE deployment service that will be free for at least the next 6 months, if not longer. All you need to do is type

remake deploy

in your project directory and follow the instructions. Custom domain support is also coming soon!

User signups are one of the best parts of Remake. They're built-in, so you don't need to use an external service (e.g. Auth0) or build them yourself. If you create a web app with Remake (pretty much just an HTML template with a few custom attributes), you'll automatically have a multi-user application that anyone can use and sign up. A password reset flow is also built in!

Let me know if this clarifies things!

 

[blaq]

yeah! its awesome i checked it out .... unfortunately im working w/ php project right now but would love to play with it in the future and see what i can do with it...

Thanks, A lot

 

[JoyFreak]

Added to my bookmark for a read later! Thanks for sharing, sounds proper interesting and I could learn a thing or two from it!