I tried to invalidate the product, and ended up with 27 new customers

A few weeks ago, Sqriblr launched on Product Hunt 🚀 (PH launch link: https://www.producthunt.com/products/sqriblr#sqriblr) With an average of 32.2 upvotes across all my other launches, I really had no expectations. 4 hours later, when Product Hunt revealed the positions... 🥁 Sqriblr was ranking #6 🤯 Product Hunt stats: https://twitter.com/HugoHamelcom/status/1668075692200976384/photo/1 Now, let's go back in time ⌛ Sqriblr was officially launched on April 23, 2023. The first ever sort of marketing I did, was on Reddit. I wrote some posts in a few subreddits to get some feedback. Ended up being banned from r/roastmystartup, but that's another story. ~24 hours later, Sqriblr got its first paying customer. Since then, it has been full of ups and downs 🎢 Sqriblr got featured in multiple AI newsletters and directories, which brought a decent amount of traffic (truly honored for it) 🙏 With this inbound traffic, we were able to get a few customers 🙌 But we had, and still have, one big problem... Our churn rate 😬 As our number of customers were still low, I thought that a Product Hunt launch could help validate or invalidate the potential of Sqriblr. To the least of my expectations, the launch was a success 🚀 🏆 Ranked #6 of the day 🔺 407 upvotes 🗨️ 67 comments Ranking high on Product Hunt helped to get some traffic: 🌐 865 website visits -> 704 of these visits were from Product Hunt 😻 (Traffic attribution: 81.3%) Since lots of people are watching new AI tools and new products on PH: 👍 1 mention on Linkedin by The AI Edge From all the visits during the launch, some got curious: 🤑 1170 Stripe payment link visited (Unique visitors: 517) -> 504 unique visitors from Product Hunt (Click rate: 71.5%) 👤 4 new customers (Conversion rate: 0.77%) ❌ 1 cancelled subscription (Churn rate: 25%) These are decent numbers considering that I had 0 expectations. But at the same time, the conversion rate for new customers is very low. This is where I am still uncertain if Sqriblr solve a painful enough problem... Or, if it's just a vitamin, rather than a painkiller. To give you a bit of perspective on the launch impact, let me share with you comparative metrics since the very first day of Sqriblr, about 60 days ago. 🌐 1726 website visits Source Breakdown 🔗 -> 442 Twitter (Traffic attribution: 25.6%) -> 307 Neat Prompts (Traffic attr.: 17.7%) -> 182 There's an AI for That (Traffic attr. 10.5%) -> 141 from Futurepedia (Traffic attr.: 8.1%) -> 50 IndieHackers (Traffic attr.: 2.8%) 🤑 2691 Stripe payment link visited (Unique visitors: 33) Source Breakdown 🔗 -> 140 Neat Prompts (Click rate: 45.6%) -> 120 Twitter (CR: 27.1%) -> 115 There's an AI for That (CR: 63.1%) -> 20 IndieHackers (CR: 40%) -> 71 Futurepedia (CR: 50.3%) For the first time in my life, a product I made got enough traction to promote itself and get customers organically: 👤 13 customers (Conversion rate: 2.36%) But, it also comes with a downside: ❌ 7 cancelled subscription (Churn rate: 53.8%) Looking at all this data, it makes sense that Product Hunt visitors convert less into customers. Most people on Product Hunt are curious. We're all "product addict" looking for THE next thing. Which is 100% okay, but we have to keep that in mind when launching. Alright! We covered the launch and the before for you to get a better understanding of its impact. You're probably wondering, how does it look like on an overall perspective. Let me save you the headache of doing the math by yourself. This is where Sqriblr is as of now. But keep in mind, it has only 49 days of existence 👶 🌐 2595 website visits 🤑 3900 Stripe payment link visited (Unique visitors: 1056) 👤17 customers (Conversion rate: 1.6%) ❌ 8 cancelled subscription (Churn rate: 47%) As you noticed, our churn is really high, and our customer lifespan is not much better... 📅 Avg. Customer lifespan: 15.50 days -> Active subscription: 19.89+ days -> Cancelled subscription: 11.12 days 🏷️ Customer lifetime value: $9 💰 MRR: $81 Looking back at launch, it was a great learning experience. Having never experienced successful launches before, it really opened my eyes to a few things that I want to share with you all. Even though unrelated to the launch, one of the biggest learnings is: > Building a product in a fast-growing market, and extremely trendy topic, can truly supercharge your growth potential. AI is one of these market/topic, so timing within it is important! This helped Sqriblr to get featured organically in many places due to the nature of AI popularity at the moment since there's a lot of AI newsletters, directory and all. If it would have been in a different niche, it would probably not have gotten as much attention. --- Building something new to what the AI niche was used to see and understand is a double edge sword, and probably hurt our sales. We got a lot of questions from people that weren't certain of understanding how Sqriblr worked within ChatGPT. --- Sqriblr is not a plugin in the official OpenAI definition. It is an extension/add-on to it that works directly within it by using a special prompt (command) to activate Sqriblr. A subtle difference that easily confuses people, which makes the choice of word important! --- The closer you are to making the Top 10, the more exposure you'll get, which will result in an increase of organic upvotes. Getting early support during the Product Hunt launch is crucial! --- Building in public and building your close circle (community) is definitively a game changer when you are launching on Product Hunt. Leveraging your community to get support can truly help you have a successful launch on Product Hunt. --- Product Hunt doesn't provide you with lots of data to help you during your launch. Using tools like Hunted.Space can help you have a better overview of your progress and understand how to surpass other products. --- Launching on Product Hunt, is a bit like celebrating your birthday. "Don't be afraid to be loud, it's your day" --- Celebrate all steps of the launch, even the "losses". At some point Sqriblr felt down to #7, but still, I celebrated the success of our "adversary". Even in business, sportsmanship is important. --- Celebrate your supporters, they can make or break your launch! An example of how I did it here: https://twitter.com/HugoHamelcom/status/1667118619073945602 --- While thanking your supporters, give extra attention to your notable supporters. They tend to have a bigger audience and influence, which can help you reach. An example of how I did it here: https://twitter.com/HugoHamelcom/status/1667196610105753600 --- While sharing the progress of your launch, don't forget to: #1. Educate your audience about what your product does. #2. Include an easy way to find the link to support your launch. For example: - Including a tweet quote - Adding the PH button to your website --- That's a wrap! This summarizes the journey of Sqriblr up to today 🙌 In full honesty, I never expected that from a "weekend project" 🙀 Always doubted my "sales skills"... Always thought I would have to "convince" people... Yet, here I am, and none of these customers talked to me before subscribing (Truly honored and grateful! 🙏) This taught me 3 things: 1. When your product is truly a valuable solution that offer something that wasn't yet possible, especially in a trending market, you increase your chances of success. 2. Do what feels right in your gut and follow what your instinct is telling you that makes sense to you. Don't listen to anyone advice while ignoring your gut feeling. 3. Even though Product Hunt upvotes are somewhat a vanity metric, it can truly give you an indicator on how successful your product could be. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them.