14 Days to First time Launch on ProductHunt can it be done? Watch as I document the journey here!

Can it be done? My team and I are running a two-week Hackathon to revive one of our old projects. One of the goals is to launch it on Product Hunt. I've never launched a product on PH before. This post will be edited daily with my progress and learnings. Follow along and do let me know where I can improve. Our product is called FlexPDF and it is a free tool to convert PDF files to responsive HTML that can easily be edited, enhanced and shared. Day 1 - Monday, September 5th 2022 -------------------------------------- The first day of our Hackathon. I only had 3 hours of practical work as we had kickoff, photo sessions, social games, and more during the day. It's the first time we all meet in many years! I created my Product Hunt account and went through my profile. I had a quick browse around the site to get an idea of the scope and complexity. Then I started searching on Google "product hunt launch guide". I found a lot of stories, blog posts and guides! Like a LOT! All talking about many different things but one thing that stood out was "community building" and being active on PH. So I quickly went and started my first post: https://www.producthunt.com/discussions/first-time-producthunt-and-only-14-days-can-it-be-done?comment=1892071 I did find time to play around with Ship but I was a little confused as to how it works. I did manage to get something basic up and running as the tool is pretty straightforward. I then found the Product Hunt guide which I felt was an incredibly good read: https://www.producthunt.com/launch This guide really cleared up the Hunter concept for me and many other things. I learned there are so many things you can do to prepare for launch and optimize if you are really going strong and for the #1 product of the day. I felt stressed and unsure of whether this was a good idea for us when we only had 14 days! Many blog posts I read said, "prepare at least 2 months in advance". I wrote to Product Hunt support as I remember they wrote about team accounts in their launch guide "make sure they’ve created an account well before launch day so they can join the conversation and are credited for their hard work". I had no idea what "well before" meant but apparently it's one week as that's how long it takes to "warm up" and enable new account to join product launches. After the first day I was quite overwhelmed. Honestly the Product Hunt launch journey seemed pretty straightforward, but being a perfectionist, I wasn't sure if "it would be worth it" for the time commitment. Day 2 - Tuesday, September 6th 2022 -------------------------------------- Early on day two I decided that we would go for a 14-day PH launch and set our goals and expectations accordingly. Our goal is to start building a community and following in Product Hunt and to start making new connections and contributing where we can. We will launch our tool and hope to get at least 10 people to try it out and give us some feedback. With this new goal in mind it felt easier to plan and prepare for the launch in less than 12 days. I spent most of my time preparing our Ship page and reading through a lot of comments in the discussion board. I updated my profile and connected Facebook and Twitter. That's when I realized that I signed up to PH in 2018 using my Facebook account. That got me a few followers :) I was able to import 312 people to our Ship listing from our tool that had signed up in the past. That gave us some subscribers. I then upgraded Ship to Pro so I could segment these users. I emailed everyone an update and after 16 hours 51 had opened, 6 clicked and 10 unsubscribed. The plan is to use Ship and update our subscribers on a daily basis with public announcements that anyone can comment on. Here is our current Ship page: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/flexpdf I also started building out our launch page, invited the entire team to create PH accounts and added them to Ship + Product pages. Day 3 - Wednesday, September 7th 2022 -------------------------------------- I started the morning with the idea to document each day of our 14-day journey and share it with the PH community. I worked with our designer to come up with an animated GIF for our product icon and started designing the screenshots we will use. Sent out another update to subscribers and submitted our Ship page to Product Hunt to be included in the upcoming products page. I was going to record a product update video but had to wait as the latest version hadn't been pushed yet. Spent some time with our marketing girls to prepare for more messages to go out to existing users of our other products to create awareness of our Product Hunt launch. Made sure I answered the new comments on some of my posts and other posts I am engaged in. Overall it was a pretty chilled day as the Ship page was already live and ready to go. Day 4 - Thursday, September 8th, 2022 -------------------------------------- I was happy to see our Ship page ranked #2 on the Upcoming Launches page this morning! I ensured that the entire team followed the project and asked them to start engaging with the PH community. Today we mostly prepared assets for the upcoming launch page. We created an animated GIF as our icon and have gone for a continuous panorama view for our gallery images. We also started warming up our list of users to prepare for the beta launch. We are not trying to get them to register for a Product Hunt account, but instead, get them to try out our tool and give us feedback. Really curious how other Makers approach getting more existing users to register for Product Hunt in order to support their launches. As far as I know, users must register and "activate" at least 1 week before a launch so they can contribute. Day 5 - Friday, September 9th, 2022 -------------------------------------- Today was less actively working on our launch page as almost everything is ready. I spent more time connecting with other PH users and commenting on posts where I could add a little value. We did update our Ship page with a new animated GIF: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/flexpdf I created a new post where I offered to review other Hunters Ship pages here: https://www.producthunt.com/discussions/i-will-record-a-think-aloud-session-of-your-ship-page I thought it was a cool idea but so far no one added their Ship link for me to review . Day 6 - Saturday, September 10th, 2022 -------------------------------------- We started the day early ... at 1 am! We had a team excursion planned to climb one of the volcanoes here in Bali called Mount Batur. We started climbing around 4 am after arriving and made it to the summit about 3 hours later to view the sunrise over Bali and Lombok ... amazing! After the descent which was almost harder than the ascent, we went to the hot springs to "chill" :D We finished the day with lunch in Ubud. Day 7 - Sunday, September 11th, 2022 -------------------------------------- Day off for everyone. Day 8 - Monday, September 12th, 2022 -------------------------------------- Kicked off the week with a reality check on where we are with our product tool. Timelines are definitely creeping up on us. At this point we have our marketing in place and ready to launch. We will be sending emails to existing users of our other products and paid campaigns to drive traffic to our landing page. Here is our current landing page: https://www.magloft.com/landing/flexpdf/ Would love your feedback if you have a minute to share. Most of the work to our Product Hunt pages is done and I'm basically just checking in on the community discussions to reply to other posts and replies to mine. At the end of the day we invited two people to a "think aloud" session where they went through our landing page and our product. These sessions are so damn valuable as you really see and hear what people think and feel using your products. We had a ton of great learnings from this session. We had a ton of great learnings from this session Day 9 - Tuesday, September 13th, 2022 -------------------------------------- We started the day with the product team to go through the feedback from yesterday's "think aloud" session. We decided to move some stretch goals out to make time for improving some UI/UX issues. We created a super short intro video that get's launched the first time users open our tool. We also improved the landing page copy and assets based on feedback from the session yesterday. I continue to engage with the PH community where I feel I can add some value. Ended the day with another "think aloud" session which included many of the smaller improvements we had time to include in the day's work. This time it was a much easier experience for first-time users and we still got a lot of good feedback and ideas! Day 10 - Wednesday, September 14th, 2022 -------------------------------------- Only 3 days left for launch! Started the day with a reality check on our 2-week Hackathon goals. Most goals are on track. We have a lot of smaller improvements to our tool from our testing sessions. Our goal for the day is to get as many of these implemented before another testing session at the end of the day. Not going to lie, today was intense. We had to have a co-founder meeting into the night to discuss how the week had rolled out compared to our plans. Mostly due to the fact that we changed our priorities for a day to focus on feedback we had received from "think aloud" sessions and testers. It took all day to implement and delayed some of the bigger things we wanted to achieve. There was definitely some friction between product and marketing but at the end of the evening, we were all on the same page again ready to kick ass once again! Day 11 - Thursday, September 15th, 2022 -------------------------------------- Yesterday we continued to work on our tool. One of the big questions we had was whether or not it was easy for users to find and see the results from working with FlexPDF. So we decided to build in a preview functionality that was accessible for everyone. Until then, users were only able to download as an HTML file until they registered for a free account. With a free account, they can also embed and use a share link. We also cleared up a lot of tasks that were not critical for launch in order to free up dev hours for a really big feature we would love to include during launch. A few final polishing efforts on marketing material and assets was also on the agenda. It was a super productive day and we accomplished a lot at our end of day checkout. Launch Day - Friday, September 16th, 2022 -------------------------------------- Today is the day! We have just under 5 hours to go as I write this. Will update as we progress through the day. We launched FlexPDF: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/flexpdf Well didn't have much time to update during the day haha. Launching on ProductHunt was such a fun way to end our two-week hackathon! Everyone in the team was pushing hard to get that last commit, bugfix, improvement, paragraph, graphic, tracking and marketing piece ready! Our goal with launching was never to reach #1 spot. I think for a fresh PH account this would be incredibly hard to achieve unless you launch a product that compliments Product Hunt itself like https://www.producthunt.com/products/preview-hunt/reviews We wanted to start getting active in the PH community, start building relationships and learn more about how it all works. The best way to do that was to just jump in and so we did. We were able to stay in the top 15 for about an hour and then dropped to #16 which was just outside the front page. I think after dropping off the front page it gets very hard to get back. At the end of the day we dropped to #19 and that's also where we are now as I'm writing this Saturday morning (the day after). I would still do it all again for sure! We had so much fun preparing and just knowing we were going to launch regardless of the product state was a great motivation and drive to get shit done. Very much looking forward to engaging with all our testers in the weeks to come. Thanks for all the comments and feedback so far. And if you made it all the way to the end WELL DONE and thank you! Please connect on LinkedIn so we can stay in touch.