What do you think I did wrong with my launch?
Anthony Latona
9 replies
I launched my app today and I thought I ticked all of the boxes for a featured listing based on the publicly available info here:
https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/9883485-product-hunt-featuring-guidelines
Alas... it wasn't featured.
I wouldn't consider my app in any of the "unfeature-able" categories, but maybe I'm missing something after working on it for 6 months.
From my perspective, it's a full featured AI marketing content and strategy generator for startups to help figure out the best way to market their products & services.
So, instead of trying to learn everything about marketing from scratch, you can use the frameworks to create unique value propositions, customer journey maps, empathy maps, jobs to be done frameworks, product differentiation canvases, KPIs & OKRs, SEO ideas (pillar-cluster), content matrix and 4Ps idea generators, and much more... it's surely not a template, article, blog, directory, vaporware or anything described on the list.
I'm wondering if anyone can see anything I could have done differently or if I missed something in the feature criteria.
I believe that it's useful for founders & marketers to help with new ideas, especially when you're stuck. I haven't personally seen anything like it before. Sure, there are strategy generators but not entirely through the lens of structured frameworks.
It's built it entirely from scratch (with Laravel) with no themes or templates either.
I think the design came out nice, but I guess I'm biased since I designed it myself and maybe it's too colorful... Finally, in my opinion it's got a bit of a creative twist too. Each of the frameworks includes a "memory anchor" to help you remember the framework so you can come back and use it when the time arises. These are like fun little flashcards to remember each framework.
Anyway...
✅ Useful, ✅ Novel, ✅ High Craft, ✅ Creative
There's a 4-step Go-to-Market strategy process and quick start guide to help people apply the frameworks in various situations too.
The launch is here if you have a second to check it out: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/marketing-frameworks
If anyone has any feedback or ideas for future launches, I'd really appreciate it. Maybe version 2.0 can get featured.
Replies
André J@sentry_co
1. Thursday is the new Tuesday. 😅 Thursday used to be easy game. But now everyone thinks that 😅 2. You say it's Novel. But if you have been around PH the last 24 months. you have seen a lot of these AI marketing content generators. Alas it's not novel anymore. If you launched 18 months ago. It would still be novel. Said that. You can definitely make a marketing content generator that is novel. But then you have to be front and center about why it's different from the 100s of other marketing content generators. To my knowledge this sort of app is now a 30min job. Fork a preexisting marketing generator on GitHub and change the logo. Not saying you did that. but it would have feature parity with what you launched. And if not. There is your chance. nail the why your different than the rest. And you featurable. For what you launched. it doesn't matter if it's high craft or useful when novelty is zero judging from how it's presented. If you have some magic differentiator you're not taking about. Put it in your tagline and description and your featurable 100% and you can relaunch in a little while with the updated info and it will definitely be considered featurable, depending on what else is launched that day of course, sometimes competition is just intense. And feel free to DM me on LI if you want feedback on your PH pitch deck 😸 Sometimes is just how you communicate your product. The PH team has like 30s to make a call while reviewing 200++ of products everyday. 😅 So clarity is king
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@sentry_co I wasn't commenting on the customer's interpretation of the product, I was replying to your comment insulting my product and your misinterpretation of what it is and how it works. I understand that you think it's garden-variety and I'm obviously not selling to you as you appear to know everything already.
Can you find a similar product or name any similar products that uses marketing frameworks this way?
I think I'd get more out of your comments if they weren't so disparaging and insulting but I do get your points and appreciate the effort to write such a long comment.
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@sentry_co Good points, thanks. I'll definitely push away from saying it's a content generator because that's a very small part of the feature set. I've been on PH for many years and of course I've seen every canned AI script launched 100 times so I wanted to make something different that's not just another copy...
If you look a bit closer, it's surely not a 30 min job, but I guess that's what you think... It's not a rebrand or a fork and it generates actually styled frameworks, with thousands of lines of tediously tested prompts and not just blobs of text output. I guess that should have been much clearer.
Actually, the first version I deployed was a customized but existing script and it was terrible so I scrapped that entirely and spent ~6 months learning Laravel (this is my first from-scratch product...) to build what I actually thought was useful and helpful instead of weak prompts, and uncontrollable outputs.
In any case, it's not a run-of-the-mill content generator, but I guess that's how it appears. I'll have to explain that much better going forward.
Thanks for the candid feedback.
@anthony_latona That's the issue. Don't expect the customer to "look deep" that's not how product positioning works. Your mid-slide literally says: "marketing strategy content generator for startups" which as a potential customer. Im going okay. This was cool 12 months ago. Now even vanilla ChatGPT has feature parity with this. Pass. You have 10 seconds to dazzle potential customers to use your product instead of what they use today. Users only switch to something new if they clearly 👉 understand 👈 why your product will improve their life moving from what they already use to something new and shiny. That's the name of the game. That said, in your case it's just the overwhelming amount of similar products on the market atm. It's still possible to get featured in a saturated red ocean market situation, but then you have to stand out with something. And it has to be communicated front and center that that is what makes you different / better. You can't expect users to spend tons of time to try and find out. In your case, yes it's hard to find that one strong differentiator. As such it's not PH featurable as is. 16months ago it was. The good news is. Now you know how to build in this space. So just find something that isn't already saturated and has become a garden variety product. And make that. So probably not something that is hot right now, because it will take time to build. But something that will get hot 6 months from now, when you're done. Looking forward to your next launch! And feel free to DM me if you want feedback on product positioning. 😸
@anthony_latona You asked for feedback. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Im just giving it. And yes. there has probably been launched 100s of marketing content generators the last 2 years here on PH alone. Im sure out there in the world 1000s. Oversaturated. Your niche angle is alright. But again feature parity with ChatGPT is pretty close at this point. It knows about my business, if I ask it to suggest some common marketing strategies and make a few drafts with my company knowledge, im sure it would be pretty close to what your offering, alas it has been comodotized. If your miles ahead, and your product offers way better marketing plans than what vanilla ChatGPT can. Then it's your job to clearly communicate how it does that. Not me or potential customers. Awareness is key I think. And you get awareness from asking for feedback. Some will be candid some will be all praise. Personally I learn from people who just say it. Even if it stings. In any case. just asking for feedback shows that you are more aware than most people out there. I wrote an essay on how you can use feedback as leverage: https://eoncodes.substack.com/p/... have a gd weekend. 😸
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@sentry_co Sure, I know now that you think my product sucks. I get it. It's still not a BS content generator but I know that's not going to sink in. I guess my positioning and messaging was so bad that I can't convince you otherwise lol
I do appreciate the advice to show how it's different than just using the chat interface directly... I guess you could try writing the long prompts and maybe make a custom gpt that is trained with your company information and ICPs data and maybe you could prompt for every framework and then get the big blobs of uncontrollable output OR you could use the platform and have the data in one place, easily reusable and end up with structured, styled data in the format of the framework you're using.
I also think that your assuming everyone is a AI prompt genius too which I'm sure you are but most people aren't.
In any case, this was a good exercise to defend the product, so I appreciate that. It may not be the most advanced thing in the world, I think I just have to get more people to use it since most people that do actually think it's helpful. My copy just isn't conveying that well enough so far.
I Love the concept! Product Hunt sometimes favors more visual posts maybe try more engaging images or gifs for next time?
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@johanna_john1 Ok, good point! I should have spent more time on the images. It's tough getting everything just right when there's so many moving parts and no one to delegate to :) I'd probably do an interactive demo next time and a long walk though video that shows the app in detail so people don't get the wrong idea about it and assume it's just a bunch of basic prompts. I failed to convey that the app doesn't just push a prompt and plop a block of content out on the page but actually outputs useful framework-based content.
I appreciate the feedback, thanks!