How not to launch your company

You seem to place a lot of weight on hitting the HN homepage. What is your expectation for would have happened had you jumped to the top slot and stayed there for several hours?<p>Would you have signed thousands of new paying users? Ignited a media firestorm and suddenly found yourselves on the cover of Inc magazine? Would you be rolling in millions today?<p>Or would you have had 10,000 visits to your homepage, a small handful of signups, a few dozen comments on the HN thread (half snarkilly dismissing it, the other half arguing about some completely separate issue that the first person to comment happened to mention in passing), and a traffic spike for a day or so followed by a return to your normal levels.<p>Having occupied that top slot a few times, I'm sorry to inform you that it looks a lot more like the latter case. You still need to build and grow your business from square one, and a year later you'd have been exactly where you are today. A few Techcrunchings and HackerNewsings really aren't going to make a difference in the outcome of your thing.<p>The real difference is made by the things you did on the other 364 days between then and now. Here's hoping you executed well.

If no one sees your first launch and/or it fails -- just launch it again. Seriously -- the vast majority of people will never notice or know.<p>I dont get this BS about depending on a singular date as a defining 'launch'. Its a good internal goal to have, but not the ideal way you want to reach your market.

&#62; Second mistake: don’t launch when somebody famous is in ill health.<p>If you did that, you'd never launch.

<p><pre><code> There wasn’t anything we could do about the poor reception on HN, but we’d been working on this for three months expecting it to be a smash hit as soon as we launched. </code></pre> If you're working on something new repeat after me: "It wont be a smash hit"<p>That way you can make a plan that will actually fit reality and create your own growth.

<i>The next 48 hours were spent fixing hundreds of bugs in all sorts of places we never expected things to go wrong.</i><p>Launching quickly # Launching prematurely.<p>I think that it takes this kind of suffering to fully appreciate the fine line between launching too early vs. too late. Sure, we're all in a rush with too much to do, but everyone should do themselves a huge favor and slow down long enough to come up with a good test plan, before, during, and after development.<p>I went through the same thing once and will never let it happen again. It was so bad, I actually considered becoming a cook instead. In the long run, it's just not worth it, to your customers, and mostly, to yourselves.

"<i>Don’t launch when somebody famous is in ill health.</i>" Is this intended to be actual advice? I think the real issue is a shabby product, especially after seeing "<i>make sure your service can sustain more than a couple of people at a time</i>" and "<i>the next 48 hours were spent fixing hundreds of bugs</i>".<p>Looking at the website I am impressed you at least have an SSL certificate, cause it doesn't look like much more effort went into it. I'm even more confused looking at the about page, it lists David as being a <i>rockstar programmer</i> who enjoys <i>working on difficult scaling problems</i>, yet he didn't plan for more than a couple of users?<p>If you want to make your service succeed put an embedded Minecraft applet on there and have it link to some of your public servers, maybe even let the user select from a few of them. Just do the same things as <a href="http://minecraft.net/demo" rel="nofollow">http://minecraft.net/demo</a>. Add some color to your site, your target audience isn't a bootstrapped web developer, it's a highschool kid who wants a Minecraft server. Add a big old buy now button on that homepage. And why does the Sign Up page not have the pricing options?

&#62;Second mistake: don’t launch when somebody famous is in ill health.<p>Is this a joke? Steve Jobs was, more or less, in ill health for years and there are enough famous people to make this advice "don't launch ever."<p>Somehow I don't think I've ever heard of Minefold. Sounds like something I would have been interested when I was still playing. Two years ago, I dumped a few hundred hours into Minecraft though and got pretty burnt out.

In my opinion, <i>launching</i> is just a PR stunt. If you don't already have users (hopefully paying users!) prior to <i>launch</i>, you're doing it wrong. In my opinion, a <i>launch</i> is really just a media event which you do to get free advertising - that is, you're product should already be well tested and validated through real users and the <i>launch</i> is a publicity thing.

I'm a big fan of Minefold.<p>Also, being no stranger to... "problematic" launches, I can totally sympathize here.<p>Can't wait to see what you guys have in store with the new update, and as long as Cook or Schiller doesn't suddenly kick the bucket, I think you'll be fine with this one :-)

Now that you've hit HN front page, wouldn't it be good to actually have a link to your product in that post? I know there's a link in the header on the desktop version, and an image with the URL midway through, but on the mobile version there's nada.

When you are wondering what value the "suit" should bring to a partnership, it is experience in what not to do in cases like this and how to recover when you do run into them. Better yet, a good "suit" will make sure that your business success isn't determined by a singular launch event (which is almost always a bad idea for startups).<p>Sometimes you can recover without that (great job on the recovery!), sometimes you can't. If you choose your "suit" right, your chances of recovery will be better.

Minefold is of interest to me and I guess inevitably the answer will be "we're doing great!" but if you can say more than that... how is Minefold doing?

<i>Third mistake: make sure your service can sustain more than a couple of people at a time.</i><p>As I am thinking to launch an app sometime in the future, how do you test for this? This is something that has been bogging me a lot. I can't find easy to understand info on how you do this, especially running on a virtual server (so how much ram? how much bandwidth? etc.).

Launching early is the first step for testing your assumptions in the real world. You don't learn unless you launch. Don't worry about timing.Just launch.<p>Lot of first time entrepreneurs learn by launching a product and getting feedback. I think there is no better way to learn than by getting the feedback from an unknown stranger.

Maybe it's the mobile version of the post but feels like some of these simple lessons about posting to HN could benefit your engagement rate from this post:<p><a href="http://www.meetingburner.com/blog/2012/10/05/a-story-of-two-front-page-hacker-news-posts-and-why-one-converted-20x-higher/" rel="nofollow">http://www.meetingburner.com/blog/2012/10/05/a-story-of-two-...</a><p>Eg - talk about what your service actually is in the post, link to it, and lay out a call to action so you turn some of the HN traffic into actual users vs browsers . . .

Upvote because I feel a little bad -- hope you can get the attention you deserve now

Thanks for the article and reminder. Good luck.

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