Don't Make These Common Mistakes When Launching Your Website

On October 22 I've launched online my first website. I'd like to share with you my experience.

But first, let me gave you some context:

1. I came up with the idea around the beginning of October.
2. I searched if there's already something similar around.
3. Nothing showed up.
4. Great! I started building the app

Two weeks later i had something that i thought it was complete.
I was ready to let the world know about my amazing website.

I decided to proceed in 3 steps:

• 1st day - HackerNews : was a complete fail, no traction at all and i've got only 6 upvote, not enough for making it to the front page.
• 2nd day - IndieHackers : was quite better but did not get the engagement that i was excepting ( i guess that it could happen 🙂)
• 3rd day - ProductHunt : was the best source of traction among the three (97 upvote) and even got some paying customer. That day i was euphoric 🥳

I was very disappointed by the first two launches. Like a little kid, as i still am, i hoped that magically all the people would love unconditionally my product and share it.

What i though was a final website in reality it was just a draft, or to be more precise my idea on how to place and promote the product was fuzzy and incomplete:

• I changed the description of my website in each of the launch. I even added one basic feature during Product Hunt's launch by reading their comments.
• I did not think about the importance of having a twitter account ( create it later , after PH 🤦‍♂️). It gives a social proof and prevent you to be categorize as a scam.
• I did not read HackerNews submission rules, i could have changed the title and observe those rules.

I can see now after a months that the major problem was me being too eager to launch my website. Being my first project ( and a IndieHackers wannabe  👨‍💻) I gave too much importance to the idea of launching it that It made me lose focus on simpler and more important things.

TL;DR

Launched my website on Hackernews, Indiehackers, Producthunt, but got traction only in the latter. I did not have a clear idea about my product and how to place it.

Those are my takeways If you are about to launch something:

• have a clear positioning for your product ( it helps when you communicate with your users and even with yourselves)
• don't rush into things ( prepare every details of the launch , even perfect product need perfect marketing)
• don't let your enthusiasm think that your product it's so good that everyone will talk about it.
• have a social account before launching ( users can engage directly with you)
• interact with the final users 🗣 ( receive comment and have a conversation with your users is fundamental for understanding how you could shape your product to better fit their needs)

I'm still thrilled of this experience. It gave me a lot of confidence in my capabilities and i'm happy to have made those mistakes. It only means next time i'll be more prepared.

I really hope that you could find some help from those words 😇

P.S. If you are curious of what my website is about, you can check  IsRicherThanYou.com and let me know what you think.