An Initially Failed PH Launch Turned Around to Get Us 850+ Paid Subscribers

Published on

November 15th, 2024

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First, the launch stats

In the end it went well — we got 500k+ impressions, 16k signups, 850 paying users (5%, higher conversion than expected for this!) and 5.0/5.0 stars with 75+ reviews on Product Hunt. Out of these, I think the user interviews following launch were most valuable.

What happened on Launch Day

We initially launched behind a waitlist (wouldn't recommend). Our reasoning: we didn’t want to overload our infra, since we have quite a complex product.

During the first part of the day we were frustrated that we were getting beaten by a very simple adword product. They were probably better at working Product Hunt than us. We did some of the basics (see learnings below) didn't follow an entire PH launch playbook.

What made the launch take a turn from flailing to successful were three “in-the-moment” decisions we took after more than half of the day passed:

We removed the waitlist (infra was holding up fine).
We posted on Hacker News as well.
We repurposed and shortened the launch post on Twitter, which had >20x better reach.

The first was the most important:

Without a waitlist, PH and HN users come back to the post after having a positive experience with the product and engaged with it.

As I like bullet lists, here are our takeaways from launch day:

Don't launch with a waitlist :)
Do post on social media with a) a short-form video and b) a simple bullet list of features.
If you have a smaller audience, I have had luck DM'ing 2-3 people who have larger audiences in the space, explaining my product, and asking them to amplify the launch. (This + one tweet got gpt-engineer, my product, to 52k github stars.)
Be proud and reach out to friends and family ahead of launch. Explain that this is something you’re proud of and share that you’d love to get their support on launch day. Support early in the day will help get more impressions later.
In-app: add a banner to let users know about the Product Hunt launch, asking for a review if they like it.

Finally let me add that I think preparing with mental resilience, and being ok with failed launches, is very important to be able to adapt, launch many times. Have the mindset to do another launch in some way right after the first one.

Overall the launch went well and now our product and thanks to Product Hunt gptengineer.app is being used by 100s of founders building the first version of their product with the Supabase integration. The best things are the weekly cold linkedin DMs reaching out saying they had a magical experience using it.

Anton Osika is the Founder of Lovable, an AI fullstack engineer. He's currently building gptengineer.app.

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