Automagically email your blog posts

Blogsend.io by Mike Timofiiv (@mtimofiiv) from Amsterdam, Netherlands

Blogsend.io_Automagically email your blog posts. You write great content, we make sure your readers see it._blogsend.io

What’s your motivation for creating your product?

I write for fun, so shockingly, my motivation was actually a personal need 🙊 I wanted a quick, easy and track-able way to send my new posts to my audience. So Blogsend was born from that.

What are your product features?

Blogsend completely automates the collection of emails of subscribers using our highly customizable widget. It also entirely handles sending the content as soon as you publish it to them, with 0 fuss on your part as the blog author. And finally, it makes tracking those emails easy and painless — you get actionable stats of how your posts perform.

When did you launch?

Tuesday, November 20th.

Where did you launch?

Product Hunt

BetaList

HackerNews

How did your launch go?

- I managed to stay on the Producthunt homepage for almost the entire day, collected about 90 upvotes and got around 300 visitors

- Betalist actually launched me earlier than I figured it would be on, and so they soft-launched me a day early ;) Got about 300 visitors from them

- Hackernews got me the best results in terms of traffic with my “Show HN” thread spending time on the first and second page for over 24 hours, generating 1.1k visitors

- I have a soft call to action on my homepage where users enter an email and their blog URL so my tool can scan it and they can preview their last post as one of my emails. That was done more than 250 times, meaning that the soft conversion performed at a nice conversion rate of 15%! This is great news for my homepage, since it does seem to convert.

- I got 4 subscribers so far. But I also recognise my product is not something that people just drop everything and start using, so 4 subs on launch day was actually fantastic!

Any specific launch tips? Or things you would do differently?

- Stop worrying about tech, build a great product. Your customers probably don’t give a shit if you use Vue.js or COBOL as long as it works. I have lost time in projects before because I wanted an elaborate queue system instead of good old cronjobs for example. Prove that people want to buy first, then replace those cronjobs if you must.

- Make sure you get your San Fran time right when launching on ProductHunt. I launched in Europe and mixed up the timezones (thanks Summer Time 💩) and without messaging PH’s glorious community manager Amrith Shanbhag (who was awesome and helped me), I would have really wasted that channel’s launch

- I got the advice to gather soft conversions on the homepage the day before launch, and spent 5 hours implementing it (hence my timezone mix-up with my lack of sleep 🙃). As a result, I now have a way better idea as to where people drop off in my funnel than just “they looked at my homepage and then bounced”.

- Hackernews was actually really great because I got some amazing feedback with real comments from potentially interested users (in my case, bloggers and publishers).

- I thought of my launch’s success as measured in subscribers before I launched, but I realized as I was in the moment that considering the amount of work I put into it, I managed quite a buzz! I’d not personally focus on that one and only KPI as my metric of a successful launch in the future. It’s important but not the only thing!