Sharing our first PH launch experiences

For context: We launched Green Wedge, which is a sustainable climate action solution, that allows individuals to take measurable steps to reduce climate impact, by participating in ecosystem restoration projects at scale. Pre-launch: Preparing our launch page was an interesting and creative task. It felt like a productive day and time well spent. Facebook PH groups were rather useless to build an initial following, as in most of them, mods take their time with post approval and it could take days in the best scenario. The engagement rate is also very low. LinkedIn was more responsive, but approximately 1/3 of the people reaching out were influencers offering paid promotion or even directly selling upvotes. Initially, I naively thought that they were reaching out because they were genuinely interested in the project. In two weeks, we built a small following on our pre-launch page, but I still don’t know how some are able to collect hundreds or even over a thousand notified people. Launch: The time just before the launch and first hours were exciting, with all that posting and reaching out to people who earlier declared support. Almost half of the people who initially declared support (or even support of their teams) didn’t keep their word, and maybe 15-20% of people who said they upvoted, didn’t do that in reality. That is what I don’t understand the most. Why are you promising something that from the start you are not going to deliver, and why blatantly lie even in such a trivial matter? Our product wasn’t featured so it already lost a lot on the discoverability. There is some contradictory information on how being featured is determined, and I still don’t know if there are any objective criteria. Regarding reduced discoverability, there were also some technical issues reported by several people, where you are not able to browse all launches from the Launch tab, so you only can see featured ones. If everyone who declared support kept their promise, we would have easily reached top 15 and probably had a chance to compete for the top 10. Aftermath: We were aware that PH is maybe not the best fitting crowd for our service, but still, there could be a bunch of environmentally conscious people who want to take climate action. The minimum plan has been fulfilled – we’ve got a backlink. Also, we performed much better than competitors, but it wasn’t that hard, as it seems that they just paid someone to get a backlink and haven’t been involved directly. Of course, there were hopes for more, especially since we thought that our product could stand out among all AI and programming products and spark curiosity that way. Also was hoping that maybe PH will feature us as a nod towards CSR/ESG. A few more subscribers also would be nice. Probably it was a mistake to post on social media right away when launched. Maybe waiting a few hours would be more beneficial, as we could come higher in people’s feeds and not be buried down by other launches. I would probably also take a bit different approach with reaching out to people, to support our launch. Maybe in the future, we’ll launch a version of our service for businesses. Then with a marketer on board. There are still some people upvoting and it looks like also some of them revoke their upvotes, as the number still fluctuates. You can check out our launch page and still express your support: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/green-wedge I also strongly encourage you to take personal climate action with us!