The makings of #makergoals
The anatomy of a Product Hunt Hackaton app, lovingly made by Kalina Zografska, Mighty Alex, Ilija Boshkov.
Hey there! If you are reading this, it means we made it and you’re probably coming to read this story from our site’s About page. Or… we’ve become stellar famous with our new product. Either way, things are well!
Makergoals - http://makergoals.com was a project thought of for the Product Hunt hackaton 26/28 Feb 2016, and it started as a story for referencing location and helping the Product Hunt community by finding influencers for local product launches.
Original idea and scope
- find all Product Hunt makers
- cross match them on @Twitter with time_zone parameter
- provide list of makers filtered by country
- create an embed badge for top makers as way to promote the app, free for top makers, 0.99 for the long tail
Marketing plan:
- tweet to top 10 influence per country to showcase the #makergoals
- a Medium post announcing the product (yeap, this one)
In fact, this is the original Google doc 1 pager for the project.
Hackaton day!
We started Saturday AM, as we’re in Skopje, Macedonia and we’re 9h behind California. Three hours into the dev cycle, we found that the location info was unusable to cover a comprehensive service. Out of the most recent 300 members of Product Hunt, only 98 had a Twitter account, only 68 of 98 had time_zone set and only 48 had a usable location (Different from Pacific, UTC, Eastern). So we would have been useless in the long term, and only have about 50% of the data available for Twitter users anyway. On top of that, we *may* have hit a Twitter follow limit by then following makers. (Thanks Jim Gray for your public Twitter list!)
Ok fine.
Pivoting and final product idea, going live
So, plan B. We will make the #makergoals badges free and since we’re all into gifs, we will animate the numbers so that we have a live dashboard and the #makergoals are natively shared in a Tweet. We will gather the top 500 makers and launch the service with them, and see if there is interest for the rest of the makers by allowing them to ping us on Twitter to go get their own #makergoals.
We finished day 1 with the full design of the leader board, leaving only the gif generation for day 2. A few image library bugs and minor cosmetics later, we’re now live!
(as live 28 Feb 15:55 CET)
We’re hoping we can provide value with insight for who the top makers are, and extrapolate from there how to achieve your own #makergoals.
EDIT. We’re now featured on Product Hunt:
https://www.producthunt.com/tech/makergoals-for-product-hunt
Feedback welcomed in comments/Twitter/anywhere.
