Product Hunt Launch Fright
I initially had been getting ready to launch FlipBooklets.com on Product Hunt back in March until I got cold feet. Although I love what I've built, will anyone else? I did a little market research before building but mainly started just because I wanted to do it, as a personal project.
I've received some great feedback from those I've reached out to but since they are existing contacts I now worry they weren't honest about the product. It is not that I don't trust them all but I think validation from sources unknown is the best type of validation.
Now looking a the product as a whole, scalability and maintenance may be an issue if I got a lot of users on the current platform. I might have to "upgrade" my MVP before I even launch.
Have you ever had launch fright that threw you off? What did you do?
I understand the hesitation, but wondering what will happen is one of the most wasteful activities you can do. There are more products that get little attention then breakout success. Don't put so much weight on PH, as PH is not tied to success, nor is it the determining factor for growth. If your product does well, but you have trouble handling the surge, that's a good problem. That's a problem you want.
Thanks Visiwig. It does feel like wasted time over the past few months.
True, that would be a good problem to have although I'd be worried about them not returning if they're met with a sub-standard experience.
Launch! You don't have anything to lose! If you do it properly you could even be on the top of the day :)
If you'd like some advice/help for your launch preparation > DM me on Twitter I'll be happy to help you out.
Haha, that makes complete sense. Then the fear kicks in. Top of the day might be a bit of an ask but I guess I can dream!
For sure, I'll DM you later this evening thanks for the offer NxAlessandro.
;)
I think everyone gets launch fright, even if the product is good. I can only say one thing just launch and see what others say if it fails, use their feedback to make changes, and launch again.
Your product looks good, only thing I would say it took me over a minute to load an example booklet that could be a problem.
yes, I would also like to point the loading time of a booklet.
try to work a bit on that, and think less about what will happen if you have thousands of users.. let's impress first 5 :D
and people have short attention span, they won't wait for this long to see it like Fayeed and I did.
That is a good point. I am a planner, I try to plan for every eventuality, I've found this to be both good and bad. "Let's impress the first 5" a good way to look at the next milestone.
I couldn't agree more, I'll take a look. Thank you.
Thanks. I guess a fail is valuable as long as you learn from it.
Thanks for letting me know. I tried to keep the example filesizes low to aid in the time to load. I'll revisit them.
Hey @beesum, I encourage you to launch. You have a beautiful site, and I could see the right people loving this.
My website may help you with the launch fright. SplashPad (https://getsplashpad.com) helps you attract attention and sell your product by suggesting language while you write about your product. We started with helping you write marketing emails to attract users, and soon we will be launching templates for product hunt descriptions.
Thanks for the kind words and the link. Looks like it would be useful, I've signed up.
Wonderful.
I see nothing "wrong" on the website and I get the concept. If my solution looked as good as yours, I would launch (I am also nervous). My only concern is that it took maybe 30 seconds to load the tesla example. I am in Singapore with a decent connection and an old Mac - In normal times I would have bailed out of the site.
Good luck!
Thanks very much LaurenceM.
Hmm, the PDF itself is 10mb which will be part of the issue. The other part is where in the world it is hosted, I will check the CDN settings and make sure it also caches those example PDFs. Thanks for pointing that out.
I wouldn't worry too much about it, the conversion rate of a successful PH to actual sales isn't that high.
Yeah I have heard this before somewhere. I wonder why that is.
Hey Beesum,
Unlike Fayeed and Brunor, the example flipbooklets loaded relatively fast for me.
Your site however, took a long time to load. I'd say 3-5 seconds. It seemed like a Heroku install that had to spin up an idle dyno.
Maybe re-frame your fear by thinking about best case scenarios instead of worst case?
FWIW, I used to publish a local magazine and spent a lot of money to have it converted into a similar flip book every month (my advertisers loved it). Maybe target publishers of local magazines, if you aren't doing that already.
Thanks TaylorDye. It may depend on which example and speed of connection, regardless I will definitely take a look at them.
I will work on the website load time to get that down.
Good point. That is something I need to do less of, planning for the worst. I'll try to look toward the best case scenario.
That is a great tip, thank you. It is not something I've looked into yet, sounds like that might be a great avenue.
I've done it... Launched on Product Hunt today. Please take a look and share 👍
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pdf-flip-books
Just a quick update... thanks to everyone for your comments and advice. I've decided to get out of my own way and launch on Product Hunt tomorrow. I'll post here once I launch, wish me luck!
@beesum Hi beesum. Do you have a email address I can contact you on. I have a start up Opportunity that I'd be keen to discuss with yourself