I released NameQL (a better domain name generator) on Product Hunt last weekend and had a great response: 1000 upvotes and lots of positive feedback. People seem to be genuinely excited about the product.<p>Now, five days on, I'm feeling high and dry. The initial traffic spike was great (8000 new users in the first two days), but it quickly decayed and I'm left with a trickle. NameQL is a bit of a one-time-use product, so those initial users aren't sticking around, and its just me and the crickets now. I guess I was expecting that a successful launch on Product Hunt would be enough to generate some sustained interest...<p>So my question to you is: What should I do now? Does the success on Product Hunt validate the product, or does the fact that interest died so quickly mean that I should move on? With the initial hype gone, is Product Hunt a dead channel for me now, or is there a way to leverage the success I had there? I'd like to be able to focus on making product improvements and release features requested on PH, but right now it feels like no one would care...<p>Thanks in advance for your wisdom!<p>---<p>Background: I built NameQL as a weekend project. I am the sole developer, designer, marketer, etc. For reference, you can check it out here: https://nameql.com , or on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/nameql .
Thanks for sharing this, it's a good, realistic look at what a PH launch means (even a successful one at it). It matches what my opinion is on the subject roughly. As a post-mortem, I think an ideal product for PH (that can take advantage of a successful PH launch) should include a signup step or at least some sort of email-subscribe step. The idea is that the PH spike gives you the burst of signups that establish a connection between you and your users, which you can then email/outreach later. In your case, it's a "one use" product without signups, so best case scenario is people will bookmark you, but may or may not remember to use you when they have a need for it in the future.<p>I don't know if this helps you at all right now, that you're past the point of the PH launch. At least, it'll be a good lesson for future PH launches. Do you have a long term plan for NameQL? The site doesn't suggest there's any sort of signup or premium service.
If you want to capitalize on your Product Hunt launch, I've seen people have success blogging about their launch experience and then getting a second bump in traffic from sharing that post on Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and Reddit.<p>In the long term, though, you're in the same boat as everyone else: you have to find sustainable marketing channels that work for your business. I highly recommend Traction[0] by Gabriel Weinberg to learn more about growth and marketing.<p>[0] <a href="https://medium.com/@yegg/the-19-channels-you-can-use-to-get-traction-93c762d19339" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@yegg/the-19-channels-you-can-use-to-get-...</a>
Ideas for featuresz:<p>- add an option to subscribe to updates or newsletter - auto-generate 10 interesting domains and send them out.<p>- add an option to watch domains based on a combination of words, subscribe by email<p>- add an option to search domains based on an industry: Health, Security, Consumer, Photo, etc... - I can share more how it can be done<p>- add an option to support a project - donate button.<p>- I would probably a/b test for moving save|buy buttons next to domain, it was not clear for me that I can buy<p>- would be nice to have some help with synonyms and meanings of the words, should help to non-english speaking users.<p>Overall, I love the project, so far it has best UX compared to others I used. The challenge with your business model - people don't need to buy domain right away, but they might put your service in a bookmark and return after a while, so:<p>1) first marketing it a couple of more months, to grow the total number of such users.<p>2) I'll probably not use namecheap, and go with another registrator - can you add more options here and make money on other referral program?<p>3) you can add a referal link to more services, such as Launch a Landing Page<p>Except Product Hunt - there is beta list, indie hackers and many forums, quora and etc - and as some said, you can capitalize on blogging, twitting about successful Launch on Product Hunt, as well as do 2nd launch with major upgrades.
I clicked through via PH. I did a few searches and left.<p>How about an option to send me updates on my query? That way, you can capture my email and notify me when the query results have changed.<p>Maybe that's not useful but I'm wondering if there are ways to engage your visitors more long term.<p>Also it's not quite clear -- is it .com only? That's fine if it is but it might be nice to add .com to the results (but fainter or something).
I might use the product once a month. So, 1000/30 = 33 users per day based on likes.<p>add a login so I can view saved words on different computers(optional) and you have a way to email users on updates.
honest feedback: the only thing with this, and most things like it is that it's not actually accurate.<p>type in best -> see it's "available" -> go to namecheap -> see it is not unavailable.<p>Once this happens <i>once</i>, you realize there's no point of going to the middleperson.