How Waitlisted got launched for us.

In the year 2015, launching a digital product has become much simpler, yet at the same time much more complex. Thanks to various sites on the internet, the need for courting Journalists and putting together a PR campaign is becoming less and less important in terms of getting your product to the masses. The most famous of these is certainly Product Hunt.

For the uninitiated, ProductHunt is a community curated list of products “Launching” on a given day. For the most part, Launching is an arbitrary term. Basically a product or website is submitted and if approved is placed into an “Upcoming Queue”. From there based on interest from the ProductHunt community it can become featured. I would expect a lot of product just sort of die in the “Upcoming Queue”, but for the lucky few each day, they move to the Featured list.

Being featured is where things get exciting, You are on the top of the homepage competing with a variety of other products and platforms for the top spot. Your rank is determined by some algorithm of how many votes you have vs the amount of time you’ve been featured.

In the case of Waitlisted we were featured very early and it became an uphill battle where often we had more total votes but were 3rd or 4th because we were on the site longer.

Now lets take a step back, It was about 7 AM CST on a warm summer day when I awoke to a slew of notifications on my cell phone. A fairly inactive Slack team was buzzing with chatter. It was the slack team I had setup for new users of my product to communicate any issues, questions or help requests. The way our product is setup is that when you apply for the waitlist or sign up for the product, you are automatically invited to the team.

Checking my notifications I saw the following:

My heart sank, “O Crap, I thought my launch has been ruined.” I had been reading, researching and planning for weeks on how to perfectly launch the product on ProductHunt and now I was doomed to die in “Coming Soon”.

My original plan was to follow Bram Kanstein’s excellent article “How I launched the #1 most upvoted product of all time on Product Hunt” as my bible. I had just been accepted by BetaList and things were on a good trajectory to launch in about a month. I was devistated.

My first thought was Damage Control. I check the ProductHunt homepage and to my suprise I was third with something like 40 upvotes at just 7 AM. Wow, I thought, I might actually have a chance. Quickly, I tried to compile a list based on friends, family and exisiting beta tests to get the word out that today was the day to show support. Next I jumped into the few startup centric Slack communities who have been supporting me whilst building the product and told them the scary and exciting news. The support and help was amazing, the great members of StartupFoundation and Bootstapped Chat helped instantly, tweeting and upvoting the news and the product.

Having been part of those communities has been great for the product, since almost Day 1, I have been sharing ideas, getting feedback and learning from other people in the same position as me. I highly suggest other builders get involved and share with others as soon as possible. Community is what makes your product great.

Having done all I could at that moment, I decided to shower up and head into the office. My heart was a flutter as I rode the 20 minutes into the office by bike. By the time I got there I imagine we were still in the top 5 and riding somewhere near 90 votes. It was at this point I became very nervous that we would quickly be eclipsed by the next great product from Yahoo, or one of the Big guy’s hunts. I was up against Partyline from Justin Jackson, and Bram Kanstein had hunted a neat product called Human Cities.

As I sat at my desk filled with anticipation, I started reading through some of the comments left on the ProductHunt page. It was really exciting and validating to hear how excited people were about the product. I found the praise and excitement to be much more validating than any of the votes. I did my best to respond to some of the initial questions, concerns and even a minor bug report. It took all my will power not to try to deploy any immediate bug fixes or improvements. The site was working well enough, and I couldn’t risk any downtime.

The thought I kept coming back to this day was how lucky we were, it could have turned out poorly, and wrecked our launch on one of the biggest sites and opportunities we had to gain free traction. For us everything went perfectly, and I think its a great case study into the way ProductHunt is supposed to work. The launch was Pure in a way, we were organically hunted and people voted it to the top because they loved the product, not because a mailing list or click ring egged them into it. To me, this was the ultimate validation, we didn’t hack our success, people voted for a product they were excited about and loved and in retrospect I wouldn’t have wanted it to turn out any differently.

ProductHunt has always been part of our strategy and about a week before we were hunted, I added some code to welcome users to the site based on their referrer. One of these being ProductHunt, just in case we were magically hunted. This code basically welcomes users from ProductHunt with a modal and enables the “Sign Up” function in the header. Without the proper referrer a user is only given the option to Join the Waitilist. I think this was good because it showed tastemakers and early adopters that the product was real without exposing the product fully, call it a “Soft Launch”.

Another lucky break was that the night before we were launched, we had setup a welcome email with Drip. Drip is marketing automation software we use and integrate with for clients. When a new user registers, it sends an event to drip which sends the user an email.

The additional integration which existed for a bit before launch was Slack. Most of our users loved the fact they could login and talk to the creators and raise issues in real time. It has been 100% better than support tickets so far.

All of the integrations we use are setup the same way a customer would set them up. It was really important for us to Dog food, it helps ensure we have same experience as our customers and identify what helps us, so that we can help them. It also does a bit to help onboard users, since they can get a feel for the experience their customers will have, since they had that experience signing up for us.

One of the most exciting things I’ve come to appreciate is the care and attention paid by Charlie Irish in the way he posted it. He did a great job including media, and writing up an amazing description of the product as a welcome to new hunters finding the product. This is what all ProductHunters should strive for. It is important to remember than you are Launching a product when you hunt something, if you don’t care about it as much as the creator, and don’t do the hunt justice, you should leave it for someone else.

The hunt was amazing and even nearly a week later we are still seeing steady traction from new sign ups and website traffic.

For our launch we have had 1,025 user sign ups, 442 waitlist sign ups, and 326 users join our slack team. This has been an amazing launch that has helped our product gain a ton of traction, a ton of feedback and a great community of customers.

In the immortal words of the great Ice Cube, “Today was a good day”