Day 1 of Tech Press List went pretty, pretty good!
At 8am in the UK I gingerly filled in the form on Product Hunt. This was midnight San Francisco time and Pieter Levels advised in makebook (no referral) to do this since the systems reset at the start of the day. I have a nice advantage in a way being based in the UK as when I launch in the morning here American systems are resetting but some coders will probably still be burning the midnight oil. It also means I probably got some European interest while most Americans are sleeping so they wake up to see comments/upvotes already (social proof).
I soon got some nice comments. At 11.16am someone made a purchase - my very first sale!! I checked Stripe and there it was in all its glory; a bump upwards in the graph. This boosted my confidence.
I got several more sales throughout the day. This is my first web project so it means a lot seeing what was a vague idea a month ago turn into actual sales!
My launch totally exceeded my expectations. Product Hunt gave a great reaction and I was no2 in Growth hacks and in the top ten in Tech category. I am totally new to Product Hunt and didn’t ask a single person for an upvote or even send a link. 100% organic which is obviously a better sign than if I had just got friends to upvote.
That said, I put Tech Press List on Hacker News and it sank without a trace. Tough crowd!
I have 300 or so twitter followers so again, I didn’t have a massive following there either. I do love twitter though and so I sent a bunch of tweets out etc.
I had a spur of the moment idea to put a screenshot on Instagram. I don’t use it much but I put a tonne of hashtags on and got a lot of likes. Not sure yet if this means anything or just spammers/ego boost.
At about 5pm I made my 5th sale. So after 8 hours I had now covered all my costs (Carrd premium pro account costs $49 and the namecheap domain was $10 or so.
I got home and watched some Freaks and Geeks. It was a great day but seeing something you have created in the real world is inherently stressful, even if it is going well :) I checked my Google analytics account and doh! I had used the wrong code. Still, I'm far more interested in sales rather than vanity site visits so not a disaster.
I submitted to Reddit in the show your startup section. That bombed too.
I ended the day (UK time) with 9 sales so $180 in total. I was in the top ten for most popular apps on Product Hunt overall and considering I didn’t push a soul to upvote me I was stoked about that! At midnight 130 people had upvoted it. So a great first day all in all!
