From Code to Launch
Danny and I have been working on Doctant for the past several months. Doctant simplifies the way you share documentation with your community. We live in Tampa, which isn’t an ideal location for a SaaS startup. While we were hacking on Doctant we would constantly brainstorm ways to generate traffic and get noticed. We wrote a couple of blog posts and a few people trickled in here and there. Although we didn’t talk about it much, there was an underlying fear that we would finish building Doctant, launch, and hear crickets. That is, no one would actually try it out. Boy, were we wrong.
Tampa Startup Scene
A couple of weeks ago, we heard about an event for Tampa startups. Without knowing much about it, we decided to attend. By this time, we were pretty much ready for launch (with some minor tweaking, of course), but we still had that fear I described above. The event consisted of about 15–20 advisors for startups at every stage of the game. There were PR advisors, design advisors, marketing advisors, and one Product Hunt advisor — Kiki Schirr (@KikiShirr).
We knew about Product Hunt and we knew that we needed to meet with Kiki. She was the first person we sat down with and we quickly vibed with her. We told her about our product and she was overwhelmingly supportive. She even mentioned that her team (at Fittr) was looking for a documentation tool like Doctant. She provided us with a roadmap for launch, a list of sites to check out, and a copy of her book about launching on Product Hunt (Product Hunt Manual). After explaining that we would like to launch on Product Hunt, Kiki got right down to the nitty gritty (as any good Hunter would) to find out exactly what day we were going to launch and what plans we had so far. At this point, Danny and I knew we were going to launch soon, but we hadn’t yet decided on an exact date. So we looked at each other, our calendars, and then told Kiki, “June 25.”
We left our first meeting with Kiki feeling optimistic. Finally, we met someone who could help us show Doctant to the world. It felt like someone we just met was invested in our success.
Launch
The week before launch we setup our AWS infrastructure and deployed our app (written in Go and React) for testing in the wild. We also iterated on our landing page, refining the design and copy. We met with Kiki at a local coffee shop and the developer from Fittr (@SeoTownsend). They tried out Doctant and really liked it.
On June 25th @ ~4AM, Kiki initiated the Hunt. While I was waking up, Danny screamed from the office, “We’re up on Product Hunt!” I ran to the office, upvoted, and began monitoring Google Analytics. We told the few people we know that we were featured on Product Hunt. Upvotes slowly trickled in. Our turn around on friend and family upvotes was embarrassingly low. Maybe we aren’t loved? However, the reception from the community was overwhelmingly positive.
As of this writing we have 294 upvotes and a ranking of 4th place for our launch day. This statement is not meant to come off as bragging or an attempt to inflate our e-penises. Other products featured on the same day received MANY more upvotes, but the reason I mention it is because we were very surprised by the turn out. Doctant was formidable. It was unbelievable that two 20-somethings from Tampa built a product that people really enjoy. We battled with the likes of Medium and GitHub — and came in 4th place. This was validation for Doctant.
The Future
We were flooded with feedback from the community and feature requests. Many of the feature requests will be implemented in the coming weeks as many of them were already in our feature pipeline (more on that later). As two developers with a passion for software and design, we iterate very quickly.
Next week we’re going on vacation. We’ll be hanging out in SF July 4–14. Even while on vacation, we can’t help but hack on Doctant and spread the word. We’re keeping our expectations in check and are going to have a great time in SF and continuing to build out Doctant. In short, we’re fucking excited for the future!
We hope that you signup for Doctant and try it out. Send us feedback. Connect.
❤,
Travis (@travjones0) & Danny (@danny_nav)
