Every time I saw someone do well on Product Hunt, I thought it was a big win.
I believed these people got lots of visitors and definitely customers who pay. Stories I heard a long time ago made me think this was true.
I launched on Product Hunt on the 1st of September.
The month before, we worked hard to get ready. We did hackathons to make our product better and prepared a lot.
We worked all day and night, got lots of votes and lots of visitors, and hoped a lot.
And. We won!
Our product was mentioned in Product Hunt's newsletters,
Got a lot of backlinks,
And many people talked about us on social media.
We spent thousands on AI,
And hundreds of hours making improvements we thought were important
...
But, as time went by, no visitors turned into customers.
Even worse, we couldn't get any feedback from users.
At the same time, the Product Hunt community is overkind, so we didn't get real feedback there either. We didn't know what to do next.
Our hope from winning on Product Hunt wasn't real.
In fact, our product didn't get any customers who paid from that launch.
I got into a classical trap:
People like to make things simple.
We want success fast and try to find shortcuts.
But there's no easy way, and it's hard to deal with these feelings.
Lesson Learned
Every product takes a long time to succeed, and founders change things many times to find the right path.
We did, too.
Two months after launching, we added the payment wall.
We started getting customers, having today over 100 paying customers
And we're still making changes.
We still are not happy with the progress.
We plan to launch on Product Hunt again
But this time
I have realistic expectations.