Ask HN: How did you launch your product?

I launched Indie Hackers (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiehackers.com</a>) a few weeks ago on HN. To make the site, I worked with about 12 different founders to decide on formatting; come up with questions; and ultimately conduct, edit, and publish interviews.<p>I waited to post on a Thursday morning, partly because I didn&#x27;t want to compete with tons of new stories on a Monday&#x2F;Tuesday, and partly because I wanted to launch as early as possible and I knew the MVP was basically done.<p>I let the founders I worked with know I&#x27;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 &quot;Ask HN&quot; feel to them.<p>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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12269425" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12269425</a>) 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.<p>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&#x27;ve added a blog, more than doubled the number of interviews, and I&#x27;m working on adding a forum. I&#x27;ve also added two sponsors, from whom I&#x27;ve made about $600 total so far.

Launch failure story here.<p>I posted to Reddit and Hacker news about the software I had built, but this didn&#x27;t attract much attention. Largely because the software wasn&#x27;t so very usable to anyone — I had mostly built something that mainly I liked. Which I didn&#x27;t realize at that time.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t realize how important good UX design is (UX design = user experience design).<p>Eventually I shut down the startup company (it was just me), and got a job instead.<p>But I continued working with the same software, on my spare time. And redesigned everything. Now it&#x27;s soon time to launch again :-) And this time I&#x27;ve hired usability testers and UX designers and asked them for help and feedback about how to make everything (the software &amp; website) more UX friendly.<p>I hope this&#x27;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 <i>really</i> talented (from my point of view), whilst others might instead make things worse.

I launched Office Snapshots (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;officesnapshots.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;officesnapshots.com</a>) just over 9 years ago by telling a few friends, who then posted to twitter, who then posted to digg where it made the homepage several times.<p>Launching was much easier than the following 9 years spent creating and growing a real business out of what was essentially an internet curiosity.

We do geocoding using open data sources <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geocoder.opencagedata.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geocoder.opencagedata.com&#x2F;</a> and launched the product at the annual OpenStreetMap conference. Many people from the industry approached us, some blog posts, nothing really customer focused. We were sponsors of the conference and now corporate members of the OpenStreetMap foundation. We&#x27;re listed in a couple of API-related directories but never made an effort to get as many links out as possible. We skipped product hunt. Our blog is regularly featured on other OpenStreetMap related blogs <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.opencagedata.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.opencagedata.com&#x2F;</a> It&#x27;s a niche really, not many companies need geocoding at scale.

We launch online products (like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feedcheck.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;feedcheck.co</a> ) with very limited budget. So, our PR campaign contains:<p>submissions to many startups directories starting discussions on Facebook startup groups blogs articles