From 0 to launching a product on Product Hunt in 2 days
Experiment
I’ve never launched a product on Product Hunt before. So, before launching something significant I decided to make an experiment and launch something small. Just to have a bit of product launching experience on Product Hunt. Late at night on September 18, I bought a domain and started developing.
Product idea
I was thinking about a small product I can create in about a few hours and came up with a super simple in-browser note taking app.
I often use that popular HTML trick which makes a simple notepad just inside your browser: “data:text/html, <html contenteditable>”. You can paste this string as a URL in your browser and start taking notes or quick edit something. But the problem is if you refresh the browser, your entered content will be lost.
So, I decided to fix this. As a result I wanted a sort of a web app which I can open in my browser and get a minimalist note taking space where I can start typing immediately and my content should be saved locally to my browser. It also should be anonymous and secure therefore no requests with any data should be sent to the Internet.
Step #1: Register a domain
Since I’ve been using Namecheap for years I bought a domain there. In the end I chose this one contenteditable.space and I bought it for $1.46 for the whole year!
2022 update: I just moved a project to a new domain — contenteditable.petpetproject.com
Step #2: GitHub repo and implementation
Then I created a repository on GitHub and started developing. It took me about a few hours to get it worked and looked as I wanted. The final version of code is here github.com/starikovs/contenteditable.space and it’s open sourced so you can go and fork it.
Some of my requirements were anonymity and security. For that I decided there won’t be any analytics like Google Analytics, etc. Also, for that reason I decided to store data only locally in browser. In this way, there’s no network requests during the note taking process and no cookies are used as well.
For data persistence, the browser’s localstorage is used. It allows to save up to ~10MB of notes on desktop devices as well as on mobile devices.
Step #3: GitHub Pages for hosting
Because my web app consists only of a front-end part I can host it directly on GitHub with help of pages.github.com. GitHub Pages’ docs have very clear explanation of how to use them and how to connect a custom domain to a repository’s branch.
Step #4: CloudFlare for free HTTPS and web traffic stats
For this product, I use CloudFlare primarily to enable HTTPS protocol for the website.
CloudFlare also gives you web traffic stats and many other useful things like DDoS attacks protection, etc. and many things are for free.
To configure HTTPS with CloudFlare you should point your domain’s NAMESERVERS to the CloudFlare’s ones in the settings of your domain. CloudFlare provides you what NAMESERVERS’ URLs to set.
Also, inside CloudFlare’s dashboard for your domain, select “Always Use HTTPS” checkbox in the “SSL/TLS” section to force using HTTPS even if you access a website starting with “http://”.
Step #5: Launching on Product Hunt
So, a day later, on September 19, I shared this web app with friends and got some first feedback.
In the morning of the next day, on September 20, I created a few screenshots, wrote a product’s description in 5 minutes and posted a from on Product Hunt: producthunt.com/posts/contenteditable-space. I didn’t ask any hunter to post the product but did everything by myself. It took me about 10 minutes to post it.
After I posted a product I shared the product’s link with coworkers and previous coworkers in chats. And started to wait. After a day the product took 18th position of ~71 and got 27 votes (for now it has 39 ones). Also, according to CloudFlare’s web traffic stats there were about 1000+ visitors that day.
And I got a whole one comment with a feedback from a real user! Thanks Ron Sheridan!
Conclusion
It took me 2 days to create this simple product from scratch and post it on Product Hunt. I know it didn’t get a place in the top 5 products of that day but now have this first little experience of publishing a product on Product Hunt.
So, it’s not a complicated thing and doesn’t take much time to post a product on Product Hunt a get first visitors or even users of your product. So, I encourage you not to wait for something but go forward and get first feedback on what you’re working on as soon as possible.
Now, try to play with Contenteditable.space and take a quick note!
Links
Website: https://contenteditable.petpetproject.com
GitHub repository: https://github.com/starikovs/contenteditable.space
Product Hunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/contenteditable-space
GitHub pages: https://pages.github.com
Namecheap domain registrar: https://www.namecheap.com
Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com
