Takeaways from our Product Hunt launch

I'm Andrew, one of the co-founders of Qrono. Yesterday, we launched on Product Hunt, and I'm really happy with the result. It was encouraging, but not viral (which means there's more to build!)

Stats (24 hours):

• Ranked 9th on Product Hunt for Feb 17th
• 1100 documentation page views
• 877 unique visitor sessions (avg 2.15 pages per session; avg 68.44% scroll depth)
• 52 sign ups
• 20 rental pages created
• 15 bookings made

Some analysis:

• More views on the docs than on our landing page is surprising!
• 52 signups from 877 sessions is 6% conversion rate from landing page visits. That's great! This leads me to believe our landing page is pretty effective, and our signup flow is pretty easy. A 70% scroll depth is also great, even from product hunt. It implies there's something interesting about what we have to offer.
• 20 rental pages from 52 signups is only 38% interested users actually trying our product in the most basic sense. That's bad imo -- my goal is to double that figure to 80%. Clearly improving our Dashboard UX is high leverage, especially the 0->1 step, from having an account to having something useful.
• 15 bookings made from 20 rental pages. This is closer to that 80% figure I was mentioning, seems fine.

High-level thoughts after launching:

• I wish we had launched earlier! The stereotype is true. I got great feedback, and so much motivation. 6% of people who visited our site actually want to try our product, wow!
• I think my co-founder's twitter thread was really crucial to the success of our launch. Luckily, we have a good network of friends who support us, and they all retweeted and supported our launch without us even asking <3.
• Similarly, I organize a small community of very ambitious upstarts in tech, and their support was crucial to our success, as well. Both in preparation to launch, and during launch. I guess the takeaway here is to find your people!!

(As an aside: It warms my heart to have such good friends, and I'm reminded that little matters in this world except being surrounded by people who love you, and who you love in turn. If you have to choose between prioritizing your startup and prioritizing your loved ones, choose your loved ones every time.)

• I want to launch more stuff! I want to build in public! We're already preparing a big revamp of our core product offering based on the feedback from launch. I'm excited to put it in front of people, because I think we can do 5-10x better than our initial offering, at least.

Suggestions:
I'm not sure I have much unique to say; we were only 9th, so you can definitely do better than us!

I guess I have three pieces of advice for very small teams and indie hackers.

1. Find your people. FIND YOUR PEOPLE. fInD yOuR pEopLe!!

Seriously, this cannot be overstated. There's lots of advice here already, but if you're struggling to make friends or find communities of practice, try being more strategic about practicing! Friendship is fundamentally about love, so practice showing genuine love and support to more people! Visakanv is at the frontier of making friends on the internet, when he talks about developing "better reply game".

2. Contract a designer for your marketing.

Don't LARP as a designer, you have better things to focus on. There are incredible designers from Ukraine, South America, etc. who will charge $25-30/hr. Even if you have to pay out of pocket, it's worth the $500 for a beautiful landing page.

You can help your designer by collecting many screenshots of the aesthetic you want to achieve. Find similar products, find designs you like, and then send your designer a Pinterest board for inspiration on each "module" you want designed; then let them take it from there.

The reason it's worth the cost is because it's worth really knowing WHY people didn't like your product. If your design sucks and causes 99.5% drop-off, you'll never get real feedback on the product itself. Yes, this kind of sucks, but the 80/20 is not too bad, and you'll be happy with the result.

3. Stop fretting, just launch. A bad launch is better than no launch, because it provides you with vital INFO.

I'm not the first to say this.
"If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late"
Etc etc.

But I heard all this advice, and we still launched too late! I wish we had launched earlier, I wasn't embarrassed enough.

After launching, certain things immediately became clear to us. It wasn't just about debugging -- it was about what people liked, what they were drawn to, what they understood, what was confusing, etc etc..

You just can't keep shooting in the dark after your initial hypothesis, so LAUNCH!

If you're still reading this, you've been reading too long! Go launch your product and then DM me and I'll give you a "hell yea"

Conclusion:

I don't want to stop iterating on Qrono until it's absolutely viral. We should make it so trivially easy to launch a rental company that you can do it without thinking about it! You should be able to rent your stuff AS EASILY as you can make a craigslist post. Actually, even easier than that! Why the fuck not?

Launching gave me conviction that we have a seed of a good idea. Something exciting, but not quite there.

I'll see you all again in a month, with a much more impressive version of Qrono.

Until then, keep hacking! :)