When we started building Cardybot, our goal was to help teams celebrate birthdays. It basically helps your team group-sign physical cards while remote and everything else is taken care of in background. Most times, I see birthday wishes/cards/gifts that come from the top of the organization end up being impersonal and routine so the aim is to help solve that.Ok, so we hoped people would want to use Cardybot because having been remote for a few jobs now, this is something we knew we would use. We decided to "launch" on multiple channels over a week or so. This happened about 5 months ago now so I'm glad to finally be writing this to share how it went and what lessons were learned.It all started on a Friday - I posted to Hacker News as a "Show HN" and it did not even make it to the Show HN Page - instead, it remained in the new posts section. This was a bummer - there were only 10-20 visits to the site and of course, no signups. The next thing I did was a post to a few Reddit threads the following Monday and Tuesday. This included r/EntrepreneurRideAlong which brought in a lot more traffic. On Tuesday, there were 200 visits to the site - up from almost nothing. We also got our first round of feedback, which was almost entirely positive. Finally! Some validation from the market. Also, the day ended with our first customer.With all the feedback coming in, we threw up a newsletter signup box on the site so people can stay in touch. I recommend doing that from day 1, by the way.With momentum from earlier in the week, I decided to give Hacker News another shot. On Thursday at 8:45am, I made another HN post. This started off about the same way as the previous week. Hardly any traffic. BUT, the HN moderators happened to see it and decided it was quality content so it should be placed on the front page. It was a surprising and well-received email - that was at about 12:45pm. Basically, they move it to the front page and if it is in fact a good post, it'll end up staying on the front page for some time.The post ended up staying on the front page till 10pm that night. It remained on the Show HN first page till the following day evening. One thing we saw is we had to keep responding to comments - fast. It seemed like whenever we stepped away, the ranking will go down and then upon responding to more comments, the ranking will go back up. Not sure if the algorithm was reacting to comments by the OP or just by how active the thread is. Anyway, on Thursday alone, there were about 3000 visits to the site. A huge difference from 10 visitors the previous week even though the post was almost the same (?!). Feedback was excellent again so a Product Hunt launch was in the works - images, text, etc. A PH launch for early next week would be great, we said! Maybe we'll even get someone popular on PH to hunt it.On Friday, we wake up to several more comments on HN. One of them says:"Hey there! This looks fantastic, just wanted to let you know someone's now hunted this on Product Hunt, you may want to mark yourself as the maker there!"Needless to say, I was not pleased. This is not how our PH launch was supposed to go down. Took a quick look at the hunt and the assets (at the time) were much worse than the planned ones. The hunter just threw up whatever he could get. Luckily, it still had 24 upvotes and was at least above the fold. Then the scrambling begins. I looked at the hunter's PH profile and saw a twitter handle, so the first thing I do is hop on twitter and try to reach him so I can get added as the maker and change those damn assets! But no immediate response - to no surprise though because the hunter is based on the other side of the world so was probably heading to bed :(. Now back to PH - I reached out to them through the on-site chat and let them know that I'm a maker and need to get added to the product. The PH moderator helps out by adding me. Phew! Next thing is to change the assets and give a proper introduction to Cardybot. After that though, I notice that our PH ranking drops from about 10 to about 14. It seems like their algorithm doesn't like you changing text and assets on the fly. Even though Cardybot got more upvotes than things above it, its position hovered around 13-14. Quite disappointing.Later in the day, I realized that PH had given a little shout-out to Cardybot in their morning newsletter. Huh, so I guess it was a good thing someone randomly hunted it - placed just at the right time to get caught by the PH editors' eyes. Ok, we were less disappointed. This day, about 1000 people visited the site. By Saturday morning, we had 39 companies on board with combined thousands of employees.Definitely a wild ~week for us from not knowing whether anyone else wanted this to getting market validation and lots of feedback to make Cardybot even better. Hopefully this was useful to anyone planning to launch soon!Five months in, we've already sent tons of birthday cards. If you don't use Slack or would like to send physical cards for personal use, we now have something in the works for you! see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
0 comments:
Post a Comment