What I learned from my first Product Hunt launch and why it was an amazing experience

8 min readMay 12, 2018

I’m starting a mission. I’ll make and launch 3 products in 3 months. 🚀

Just to explain a little why I’m starting all this, I’m a 19 years old Brazilian and I really love to listen to Novos Baianos. They have a song called Farol da Barra and since last year, it’s one of my dreams to go meet this place, at Salvador. I hope that with 3 products I can get the necessary money to do this adventure. I need $500 to do it.

I’m going to make the most awesome products for you while traveling the world!

The First Product

Everyone procrastinates, some more than others, and we almost never realize how much we do this.

When searching for productivity tips, my friend Lucas told me he tracked all his productivity along the day with a stopwatch and a note, so he could see how much he was productive at the end of the day, based on the free hours he had (removing sleep, college, transportation, etc).

His goal was to be at least 70% productive every day, consistently. I loved the idea and wanted to create an app so everyone can do this easily and keep track of not just your productivity but also procrastination.

So, idea: a menu bar app for mac that shows in real-time your daily productivity and procrastination progress based on the free time you have every day.

The day after the idea

I thought it wouldn’t work because it was too simple, or not too necessary. Lucas then asked me: How many days do you need to do it? I said, well, maybe 5. He said: Then just do it!

Just do it. I remembered this.

I started the app 26 April. I didn’t know nothing about Mac app development, but I had the idea, the courage, and the enthusiasm to dive myself into this new world. I always wanted to learn Swift so this was exciting.

I found a tutorial that helped me a lot during the first steps. If you also want to read it, it’s this one.

I started to vlog my life and published two videos — I was supposed to post during the 90 days (3 months) but I found it too time-consuming, and I was struggling to balance it on my routine. The first one you can check it here — this is the first time I’m spreading it.

In those videos, you can watch how ideas were coming up to my mind as I was moving forward with the development. These ideas were registered during the series, for example, the emojis one, that I believe were important for the app because a user said: “The emojis are the best!”

So if you don’t have ideas to make your product better or funnier, just keep looking for, and go do some other shit. I had great ideas while walking and in the gym.

Find friends for your journey

Last month I saw a presentation that told me I was using Twitter the wrong way. Then I decided to change it. I started using Twitter to communicate with people all around the world, and with ones I admire. Twitter is a place where you can meet new people and share your ideas to the world — it is great to build your audience.

Also, I started writing in English because I’ll launch all these products on Product Hunt, and most of the users from there don’t speak Portuguese. 😅

Along the way I tweeted a development achievement:

And got the first interested person minutes later:

I was amazed. This meant that there were people outside interested in what I was doing. I started talking to Lenilson and found out that he’s also from Brazil!

Lenilson introduced me to a community of Apple Makers, and this was a very important step he did because they helped me in the development. I talked a lot with Andrey Azimov — he developed the Progress Bar OS X (Product of the Day April, 22).

Ask people help

Don’t be afraid to ask people help in the development or launch — they can give you priceless tips.

Choosing name and logo

I didn’t waste time on it and maybe you shouldn’t too. I totally handled it to A.I. technologies and got great results. 🤖

Namelix for the name and Logojoy for the logo. 👈 👀 Gold shit here.

Came up to this:

How to sell it

I made a cool landing page with a branding focused on a straight-forward person, and used a lot of emojis. I’ve read 2 great articles of copywriting that can also help you, they are:

Also asked for my friends to help me with copy, Lucas and Felipe.

I still have difficulty to pitch mprove the right way, couldn’t find the best way yet — but I’m looking for it 🕵️‍.

Don’t be afraid to charge for it

Some people think $5 is too much, and it may be. But I decided to price mprove at $5 (actually $4.97) and it worked well. I can’t say it’s the perfect price because I didn’t test another one, but my mindset was to focus on earning more by selling less, and it just worked.

Tools to sell it

I could submit the app on App Store, but that would have cost me $100/yr, and I couldn’t afford this much money, I want to save it all to the trip 🤓

I’ve searched for some websites where I could sell mprove, and the best I found is Gumroad. You can start for free and the fees are not that big, the checkout conversion rate is amazing (11% here).

I just uploaded the .app along with a README.txt explaining how to install the app and set it up properly to start at login. Than, gumroad took care of the rest! When someone buys it, they already can download both files. Easy peasy.

How to launch

Prepare your heart for a lot of emotions on this stage. You’ll go up and down the whole day, and a lot of things will pop into your mind.

How to launch? I still don’t know the perfect answer to this question yet, but I learned some things that you can also use for your next launch 😀

Tweet your launch, this is the first thing to do after launching on PH.

13 days after the beginning, mprove was ready to be launched. I started searching for places I could share it, and I wouldn’t underestimate any of it, because they all performed pretty well:

P.S.: Remember to add ?ref=platform_name_here in all the URLs shared outside Product Hunt because you’ll be able to track your users in Google Analytics (also super important to implement tracking)

Don’t be afraid to test things

Throughout the day, I changed the orders of images on Product Hunt, the description, removed sections of the website, etc. I did some tests. Feel free to do this, it can improve your results!

Tips about when to launch it

Remember that Product Hunt timezone is PST. If you live in a country that has another timezone, you can search things like “PST now”, “13:00 in PST” in Google to convert time zones or use other websites.

If you’re looking for more time to get upvotes, the best time is 00:01 PST, that’s when Product Hunt resets.

Don’t do what I did. I launched 01:51 PST (05:51 here in Brazil). This was dumb because I believe there are 2 kinds of people:

Those who, before sleep (00:01) visits Product Hunt
Those who wake up 07:00~10:00 and after some time visits Product Hunt

Launching 01:51 probably won’t get any of these two. So I would recommend you to launch either 00:01 or the time when your community is online.

Upvotes numbers are not everything. What matters it’s how fast you get these upvotes. Mprove passed projects with 40 upvotes ahead because it got upvotes quickly.

The first upvotes are the hardest ones

Prepare yourself for this. It doesn’t matter you have the best product in the world, if it’s not featured, your upvotes will be low. Make sure your product is featured (on the “Principal” tab) and between the top 20 products of the day, so people can see it.

I had to hurry but contacted most of my network to check the project. Don’t ask for upvotes directly, it can do damage if the PH’s algorithm discovers it.

You still can get sales after the first day

I thought Product Hunt launch was a one-day thing. Oh boy, I was wrong. The second day is also good thanks to the daily email and the recommended section. And you still can get sales even weeks later, because your product will remain there forever.

First sales

First sales are the best thing — and it happened 4 hours after the launch. I would recommend you to always email people who bought your product, especially the first one.

I was afraid that the app wouldn’t work in other macs — indeed it didn’t work for one user that had an older mac version (beware of this). But happily it worked for almost all of the cases :)

You’ll also get feedback by doing this and can start working on new features!

Results (4 days)

🌎 1051 sessions

🛒 149 views on the buy page

🤩 15 people bought it

🔝 90 upvotes on Product Hunt

💰 $74.55 Total revenue

Since I learned a lot and this was just my first launch, I’m very happy with the results, and now I’m 13% closer to my main objective 💫

For the next launch

I should have invested more time in pre-launch. For my next launch, I’ll seek press coverage weeks before and hope I can get better results.

10 Final Thoughts

Have an idea and can do it fast? Go for it.
Don’t underestimate your product.
Register your journey and find people interested.
Don’t be afraid to make money with your work.
Build your audience first. I didn’t do this and I regret.
Thank all the people who bought your idea, they were pretty cool with you! ❤️
Watch out the timezone of Product Hunt.
Prepare to spread the launch to your network the early you can, because first upvotes are going to be hard.
Make something different — it doesn’t need to be the best.
Enjoy the journey!

Want to follow me on my 3 Products in 3 Months journey?

Follow me on Twitter or here on Medium.

If this was useful to you, please help it reach more people by clapping :)

And if you also want to see me in Salvador and the awesome things I’m going to do, you can help me get there first by donating here or buying mprove!