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How do you know you’re ready to launch? 🚀
Product Hunt newb here 🙋♀️ I’ve been enjoying digging into discussions and checking out other product launches as I prepare to launch my product. My question for more experienced PH members is how do you know you’re ready for launch day? What are some key indicators you look for?
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Joanfihu
MVP is ready. You don't really need to have everything out. If you still don't know who your customers are, that's ok, target a few segments and see who comes.
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In my experience, you will always have the feeling that you are never ready to launch; that there is that bit more to be done; that niggling bug to be ironed out.
That said, the following indicators have worked for me
1. When early adopter customers indicate happiness ( or point out less and less of problems)
2. When your own QA is not showing up any major show stoppers, minor ones will continue to pop up
3. When a deadline (usually customer deadline) looms
4. When you feel that a customer will pay for this (this is different from the feeling that this is not perfect. Easy to mix the two up)
After launch, you will always find problems you missed and features that should have made it to launch. That is par for the course. Keep working on them after launch.
@kkumarkg I think #4 (When you feel that a customer will pay for this) is the key. Regardless of whether its ready or not, customers are getting enough perceived value from your product that they are opening their wallets is a great sign. #5 in my books will be that customers are actually using my product! Believe it or not, I am disheartened when someone buys my product but never opens it. 😿
It is always best to pre-launch fast with minimal features, get feedback, iterate your product based on it, find P-M-F, and re-launch. And, repeat the cycle.
@iban_rios totally agree - let users tell you what you should build before you get too deep into feature set.
So in my experience of launching my product on PH, I, along with my co-founder, kept on delaying the launch as we wanted to be prepared in the best possible way to perform well and end up having a rank of the day.. Some key points we considered were,
1. We decided a launch date.
2. We created a buzz on social media about our launch.
3. Since we wanted to make sure if our product is a tarpit idea or not, we had to launch with the very basic features.
I would suggest to do some homework but do not go in too much depth. Focus on launching it organically. Our product was 5th product of the day and we were very excited when our product got featured by PH. Our product was also featured by PH on their facebook group.
@ammaramehdghani this is great insight - I've been struggling with the same tradeoff decision of waiting and making it perfect, vs. "just shipping it." It's so helpful to learn from other's experiences, so thank you for sharing.
@julia_putzeys I agree. We always get to learn from others and their insights are helpful. Good luck to you for the PH launch. Let me know if I can help you with anything.
I wrote a thread about that, which can be summarized like this:
1. You have satisfied clients who are paying for your product
2. You've already done PH launches on previous products (we tested with small side products until we understood all the mechanics and were confident we could reach #1)
3. You have the right community/audience around you who will be happy to support you
In some rare cases though, none of that is necessary. Sometimes a product just "hits" with the community here. But most successful launches (spots 1-3 on a weekday) are the result of a lot of preparation and audience building.
Here's the thread if you want to know more: https://twitter.com/tomjacquesso...
@tomjacquesson thanks so much for sharing. I hadn't thought of practicing with other products (#2)- smart!
Just ship it!! I will say that there are plenty of checklists out there, but from my first-hand experience users on here were excepting (had a couple of bugs we overlooked), and their feedback was great and insightful (gave us ideas we hadn't had and found use cases we hadn't experienced yet).
Build a list of people to reach out to the day of your PH launch to remind them to go on and vote and comment on your launch, early upvotes and comments pay dividends for the whole day of your launch.
Also, asking an experienced hunter helped us get through some checklist items.
@dawn_veltri1 what else can you add to this?
@cory_crapes @julia_putzeys
Hey Julia!
Honestly, your app has a great website and a way to capture email addresses. And you have an app with over 100 reviews in the App store. Social channels with decent follower counts. You are ready!
Th only thing I would add would be to set a clear goal for the day, so you can measure success. Is your goal new users? Feedback? Visibility? Building an email list?
Let us know when you launch, so we can support you!
Shameless plug - Install the free version of RAEK on your site to build that list faster. 😉
@cory_crapes @dawn_veltri1 Thanks so much for checking out Trash Panda and for the feedback, I will definitely keep you posted! And I'll be sure to check out RAEK as well :)
@dawn_veltri1 @cory_crapes thank you for the insight! Starting my list of contacts today 👍
I launched as soon as the product is built for 2 reasons.
1. I've built the product in public. I want to launch it faster, as people will have a better recall value when they see my product on PH and hence I can get more upvotes.
2. I want to avoid delays. Mine is a mini product, so the more I delay, the less I will be interested in it.
@karthik_tatikonda makes sense. I only wish I had known about PH earlier in our process!
Hi, Julia)
I have prepared a plan. As soon as I close all the items in it, I do the launch.
I have an action template to help prepare the launch: https://docs.google.com/spreadsh...
Key criteria I'm looking at to assess the launch readiness is the size of your user base. If you want to finish in the top 5 you need at least 500 email subscribe to ask for support on the D-day. If you are far from this number I recommend to make a no-frill launch for now (targeting top 10 and spending max 5 hour on the launch), and do a second hunt 6 months later.
@fabian_maume great tip, thank you! I've heard that you want to avoid bringing in a lot of new product hunt users on the day of launch though. Do you prep your email list to get them to sign up a few weeks in advance?
@julia_putzeys That tends not to be effective. Upvote from recent accounts doesn't have much impact. It is more effective to invest your time in connecting with people who are already active on product hunt. You can for example look at people who upvoted similar products.
Eagerly waiting for more comments on this thread. I too have similar questions
