41–50 of 76 posts
It seems Product Hunt is closed to most submitters... how did you post there? Did you score an invite?
To be fair, I do think product hunt brings in a tiny amount of traffic.
I've found HN to be a high quality community. There is a higher concentration of people that can give you meaningful feedback when you post your product under a Show HN. Product Hunt on the other hand seems to get you really useless feedback. Product hunt just feels like it belongs to a clique, is way too hyped up and lacks substance . To be fair, I do think product hunt brings in a tiny amount of traffic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to compare. Any tips?
I think Lifehacker editors read a variety of blogs, so if you appear in one of those, you probably have a better chance of getting noticed. It's been a while, but probably smaller blogs that are focused on new companies - KillerStartups, MakeUseOf, ProgrammableWeb, that sort of thing. You can also try emailing them (tips@lifehacker), but I imagine that they don't read all of those.
The lesson is here to chillllll. Wait. Hold on. You don't need to "launch" your product as soon as v1 is deployed to Heroku. HN, product hunt, and Techcrunch will still be here in seven months. Don't waste your window of opportunity for "launching" by announcing an extremely rough, underdeveloped product. Hold out until you have customer feedback and have refined it sufficiently. Then, the leads you get will be infinitely more valuable.
The most important lesson to learn from this successful "launch" is that they iterated on their product for seven months of beta before officially launching it. How often do you see "Show HN's" of half-finished side projects with no actual customers? All the time. And the feedback is rarely good. Even if it is, the percent of qualified leads will likely be drastically lower than if you release a refined product, sinc…
I think what you're getting at is suggesting that people do a soft launch or a private launch of their minimally viable product. (I agree with this).
You can't get "customer feedback" unless you have "customer(s)".
The most important lesson to learn from this successful "launch" is that they iterated on their product for seven months of beta before officially launching it. How often do you see "Show HN's" of half-finished side projects with no actual customers? All the time. And the feedback is rarely good. Even if it is, the percent of qualified leads will likely be drastically lower than if you release a refined product, sinc…
> Hold out until you have customer feedback and have refined it sufficiently. Then, the leads you get will be infinitely more valuable. I think what you're getting at is suggesting that people do a soft launch or a private launch of their minimally viable product. (I agree with this). You can't get "customer feedback" unless you have "customer(s)".
Yeah, but my experience is that the feedback from people that are actively trying to help you is less valuable than the feedback of people telling you what they actually want and would pay for.
It's the difference between "I would pay for X" and "I think that other people would pay for X"
HN: ~10K sessions, 293 requests for beta access, on a Tuesday+Wednesday
PH: ~1800 sessions, 495 requests for beta access, on a Friday+Saturday
I have a very hard time separating out HN's impact long term because of the no referrer, PH doesn't do that and from last friday to tonight (wednesday), we've gotten a total of 2,687 visitors from PH and 709 signups (yes, a 27% conversion rate). We got even more indirect signups from PH via tweets that I don't think we would have gotten otherwise.
I don't know how things would have been different if my HN post was specifically geared at telling HN about Machete and our data visualizations instead of just a sample visualization we made. Had tons of PH readers email me asking about specific features, if we were looking for funding and when they could actually get into the beta. Didn't really have that at all with HN. Although I would say that we had equal numbers of VCs from HN and PH sign up (assuming they didn't use their gmail account)