How Product Hunt helped us launch My Year Printed
About a year ago, Oliver Chank and I had an idea: My Year Printed.
The idea was simple: turn your Instagram pictures from the previous year into a beautiful poster.
So we went to work, made a prototype in a few hours over the weekend and had samples shipped to Akufen (the agency we used to work at).
The posters turned out really well, and we decided to go live with it.
We spun up a droplet on DigitalOcean (referral link!), went from test mode to live mode on Stripe and hoped for the best.
We had our good friend Alexandre Champagne push it on his page, submitted it on Hacker News and Designer News, and immediately started getting a lot of traffic…
We made three sales that day, and refunded one of them.
And then, no other sale came in after that.
Things had not gone as planned; we launched too late. Mid-February was not a good launch date.
The site was practically a ghost town from then to November 9th 2014.
We had had enough, things were not going well, and we settled for one last, final push.
We resubmitted to Hacker News and Designer News, not really hoping for anything.
We got a few upvotes, but nothing substantial.
That was it.
We were going to shut it down and put this failed project behind us, never looking back.
That’s when it all happened
I got up the next morning, ready to take it down.
I had an unusual amount of new emails in my mailbox, all coming from My Year Printed.
Those were all new orders. I was skeptical, so I went on Google Analytics to see where it all came from…
We couldn’t believe it. Someone posted it to Product Hunt and it got attention throughout the night. Sales were pouring in.
On that day, we were #3 on Product Hunt’s frontpage. It was insane.
Over the next few days, things settled down a bit. We were down to about 1–2 sales per day. We were not expecting any other kind of big traffic…
A few days later, Product Hunt put up this page, listing cool Instagram products and blasted their email list with it.
Sales sky rocketed again, and went down a bit after a few days.
We’re back to 1–2 sales per day.
All in all, we’re very pleased with our Product Hunt experience.
Product Hunt kept this nifty little project alive, sent tons of visitors our way, taught us not to give up too quickly and that timing is key.
We’re ready for New Year’s and are hoping to get a few more orders in after January 1st.
Thank you Product Hunt, you’ve been awesome.
(And a special thanks to Narek as well)
