Ask HN: How did you launch your product?

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.

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) 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.