Reflecting on my ProductHunt Launch

Procrastination

I have had the product (TemplateTo) in a launchable state for a while now, but I’ve always had something holding me back from just launching.

It was a catch up with an awesome indie hacker friend Louis that pushed me to just do it, it’s not a big deal, you know what, he was right!

After months of putting it off, I was finally ready to just get it done.

Elevator Pitch

TemplateTo enables business users to manage their own document templates so they can iterate quickly, with no need for an IT department.

Integration is normally a once and done event which we can do for you for free.

Launch expectations

I set my expectations very low, probably as a defence mechanism in case it didn’t go well. I think that was a good move, I didn’t change my approach to the launch based on these low expectations. I’d decided to do the launch so would do it as well as I could. This is the only way to really learn from something.

So I had a target for 10 upvotes, and it would be cool if I got one person to sign up.

I count a sign up as someone creating an account, selecting a plan and entering payment details.

Price structure

The pricing for TemplateTo is usage-based. There are packages where you can pay a fixed amount a month and get a lower generation cost, but all tiers are package cost + generation cost * # generations.

The lowest package is 0 a month, just charged based on usage. This is the best tier if you generate less than a few hundred docs a month.

This structure might be confusing to some but for right now it makes sense to me, it’s kind of like paying for was servers upfront, by doing so you get a cheaper price on CPU usage.

No free tier — This is very considered, I do this as I want to work with companies or individuals who want to fix their issues, I will support them as much as I can in doing that, due to the level of support I want to give I can’t currently support free users. So I have no free tier, this is the best option as Id rather not offer something at all than offering it with subpar service.

Preparing for launch

Preparing for the launch was pretty simple, I just created some images to use on ProductHunt. I am terrible at image creation but with the help of Canva, I managed to get something sorted.

I then posted the images I had to Twitter asking for feedback, got some great responses and support from people. The Buildinpublic / Indiehacker communities really are great.

• I iterated on the images based on the feedback.
• Then prepared the top comment text.
• Made sure the website landing pages was reasonably sorted
• Got a couple of testimonials.
• Updated my ProductHunt page

Not much left to do until launch now.

Launch day

Thankfully I am located in the UK, at the time of launch, in GMT, the ProductHunt clock starts a new day at 12am PST which is 8am in the UK, so not a terrible time to kick things off for me.

I had heard that getting some upvotes in early really helps with the rest of the day. So that was pretty much my sole focus.

To do this I looked at my recent posts about my upcoming launch and opened a Twitter DM window for every person who liked or commented on the posts. I then wrote a message to each of them asking if they would be so kind as to upvote my project. I did the same for people who I talk to pretty regularly who I thought would be cool with helping me out.

I prepared a post in a cool Discord group I am part of, United Kingdom SaaS (DM for an invite).

At 8:01 am I pushed the go button on ProductHunt and started asking all these people for upvotes. It was 27 Twitter DMs and the post in the group + a post to a Facebook group and I posted on about 3 sub-reddits (not sure how much they helped).

I had the ProductHunt launch management page open and responded to every comment.

Post-launch

After launch day I spent a lot of time interacting with the people who had signed up, I offered to do integrations and template builds for everyone and tried to gather as much feedback as I could.

The feedback was very clear, the UI for creating templates wasn’t user friendly enough, although it’s endlessly configurable (you can always drop into HTML / CSS if you need to) it wasn’t as clear for non technical users to work out how to create the templates they wanted while working with dynamic content.

The upshot of this is I have a good chunk of work to do in the UI. I have clear direction from users now which I think is very valuable, I just need to listen and iterate.

Results

The signup process is 2 step.

1. Step one you create an account
2. Step two you add payment details to gain access

On launch day I got:

• 33 signups
• 16 CCs added
• 387 unique visits
• 453 page views
• 16 Twiter followers
• 155 ProductHunt upvotes
• Ended the day 7th

The most valuable part of this process has been the feedback from users.

Next steps

I have some key features to add to the UI (a lot of work has been done already) to make it way more usable for non-tech users.

As a measure I have some templates I want to be able to create without touching HTML / CSS / Liquid manually, must be created 100% drag and drop / styled within the editor :)

Then I want to add more starter templates to help people get started quickly.
Then finally I will start doing some more marketing.

In closing

If you are thinking about launching your product, id suggest you just go for it, the feedback you receive is so valuable and has changed my focus back to what my customers want rather than what I thought they wanted.

You can always launch again at a future date when you go from MVP to full release or from version 1 to version 2, I know some people use this as an excuse for not launching sooner, I wish Id launched sooner when I was even less ready than I was.

I was taken back by just how supportive the community of makers and builders really are. All feedback was given in a constructive way and no one put down my efforts at any time, just so much encouragement and positivity. It’s been truly remarkable.