Sunday was supposed to be a “recharge” day.
The only day I really get to unwind & relax after the week’s gauntlet of coding, meetings, pitches, manufacturers, and the endless other things weighing on my mind for Pakible, the startup I’ve been building with my co-founder Phillip Akhzar and creative director Chase McBride.
Heh. A relaxing Sunday, nice thought.
In a nutshell, Pakible lets businesses create custom product packaging online. You just select the type of packaging you want (boxes, mailers, etc), enter your brand name, website, tagline, and upload a logo. We take it from there, manufacture it and ship it to your door.
We soft launched Pakible.com a few days prior with a small group of businesses that we had reached out to personally. There were a few bugs with the payment system, other details to iron out, but it worked.
We just threw up this promotional “10 boxes for $10" deal on the site, preparing for our “real” launch.
I knew I wanted to post Pakible on Product Hunt soon, and that’s when I saw Justin Jackson’s Product Hunt Handbook ranked #1 listed a few days prior. So I scooped up a copy, planning to read it over the weekend and pick up a few insights for a successful launch on Product Hunt.
That was plan anyways.
Read Handbook -> Post Pakible -> Hope for the best?
I remember reading a couple pages of the Product Hunt Handbook late Saturday night before dozing off. Macbook still faintly glowing on my nightstand.
I never made it past page 3.
* sorry Justin, I’m sure it’s a fantastic guide!
Next morning, Sunday
8:27am
*Uh oh!*
Do you remember that alert sound ICQ chat made when you received a new message? That’s the sound our incoming support tool makes when a visitor wants to chat with us on the site. Pretty annoying, but it definitely gets your attention.
Barely awake and squinting to see my laptop screen, someone writes in:
“Hey dude, do you ship to the UK?”
Um, do we? We haven’t even shipped our first domestic order yet, let alone thought about an international order. How did he even find us?
Facebook? Page 18 of Google search? Divine intervention? I replied:
“Sure, no problem. What’s your address? I’ll calculate the shipping for you”
A couple more support requests came in. Little odd, but I shrugged them off as a fluke.
We use Stripe for payments, and I have it setup to ping a message to our Slack channel for new purchases. One of them came across my screen.
Cool, someone bought 10 boxes. *small celebratory fist pump*
Nothing else was coming in. I figured that was it, muted my laptop, and dozed off again.
10:45am
*Ding*
Chase sent all of us a text:
“Hey we’re on Product Hunt, good job!”
Er… what?
I stared at my phone
…then to my laptop (Product Hunt Handbook still open on page 3)
…then back to my phone.
Me: “uh what? I didn’t post it, did you?”
Chase: “no”
Phillip: “???”
Seriously, am I still dreaming? What’s going on?
I immediately checked Product Hunt.
There it was, my company Pakible, sitting at #2.
I better unmute my laptop now.
*Uh oh!**Uh oh!**Uh oh!*
Oh geez.
30 pending support chats. 17 purchases.
Yeah. The internet decided Pakible was launching today, whether we wanted to or not.
Forget the plan. Just roll with it!
We later found out that a friend of a friend of a friend saw a random tweet a few days ago about us and decided to post it on Product Hunt. (thanks Maia!)
I quickly pinged the Product Hunt team on twitter, and within 3 minutes Ryan Hoover added our maker badges. We we’re off to the races.
Traffic surged, driving just over 13,000 hits to our site in 2 days.
Our support chat service broke down an hour later, dropping messages from users. I had to switch us over to another chat service during the surge. The payment flow broke on two occasions. Phillip & Chase drove our users to a Paypal payment form to keep the orders coming in while I slapped on a bandaid patch for payments on the site. Whatever plan we thought we had flew completely out the window.
Over the course of the day, Pakible would jump to #1 on Product Hunt, kickstarting our launch.
I wish I had some great insight or “hack” on how we engineered a really great launch, but honestly it just… happened. After months of building and refining our vision for Pakible, somehow it just clicked.
So just be ready to wing it when something magical happens. Once those floodgates open, theres no way to close it. Embrace it. Surround yourself with a great team ready to tackle anything and do whatever you have to keep it moving. Don’t panic, don’t stall. Just run with it and enjoy that beautiful moment engaging with your users.
We never expected to launch that day, but I’m glad it happened. We were ready, our users believed we were ready, and thats all that really matters right?
Maybe someday I’ll get past page 3 of the PH Handbook.
