How launching on Product Hunt affected my health
From the founder of a wearable tech company
After years of development, months of beta testing, and a dramatic hit to my health, the wearable tech startup I founded 2 years ago finally made it to launch day.
From conception, our dedicated team of data nerds and health junkies have spent countless nights developing the tools to help people live healthier — often at the the expense of our own health.
2 months ago, I wrote about the Ironically Unhealthy Lifestyle of Running a Health Tech Startup, where I talked about my degenerating health and how the product I had built told me just how unhealthy I had become — ironic, I know.
For some context, Biostrap is a wearable health platform that can record and recognize activities and track biometrics. The latter of those two is what has been particularly interesting throughout the process of founding Biostrap.
Because founding companies is hard work.
65+ hour weeks, unhealthy diets, minimal movement — you’re probably familiar with the cliche startup experience.
The legendary lifestyles of startup founders has been under much debate recently, but it nevertheless persists through people building companies.
Biostrap was able to quantify exactly how my body was reacting to all the stress of creating a company.
It all came to a head with our official product launch.
The all out blitzkrieg of our first 24 hours was a total whirlwind — and Biostrap was there to count every heartbeat, for better or worse. Let me break down exactly what that means.
Pre-launch Metrics
I’ve been able to carve out some time for the gym and a daily dose of cardio over the past few weeks, so while these metrics are far from where I was in bodybuilding days, they’re not too shabby.
What I monitor closest is Heart rate variability. You see, the healthier someone is, the higher the variability is in between beats.
It may seem counter intuitive, but your heart is only supposed to beat when your body needs oxygen. So a higher HRV is healthier.
As we become tired or when our body is recovering, our hearts beat more like metronomes. As you can see, my normal average HRV score is 126ms.
Launch Strategy
Before jumping into the health effects of a sleepless night and a few caffeinated beverages, I’ll explain our launch strategy.
With a limited budget and a hankering for a not so novel approach, we wanted to capitalize on the machine learning abilities and reach out to the tech community.
As a startup junkie, the ceremonious product hunt launch of tech products was something I’d been looking forward to for years.
If I can take a moment to appreciate the platform, it’s the coolest experience to see indie software launched alongside Google and Microsoft products. Product Hunt, thank you. Okay, there it was.
As for our launch, we had everything aligned:
- Hiten Shah, founder of Sprout Social and Kissmetrics, hunted our product
- Email blasts were locked and loaded for our community of beta testers
- We were ready to frantically pester our tech friends about our launch
The final part? Seeing it all through.
Optimal Product Hunt strategy is to launch as early in the day as you can — namely, midnight. After that, there’s questions to answer, people to reach out to, and upvotes to incessantly watch as your product is seen by the PH community.
Actual Launch Day
With Biostrap going live at midnight PST, we were thrown into full gear. We had laid down most of the groundwork already, but executing on our plans required one important thing: staying awake.
I lasted until 4:30 before deciding to grab a night’s sleep. After a few minutes of settling in and waking up at 8 am, Biostrap’s sleep detection clocked me just below three hours.
I typically average around 6.5 hours of sleep a night, so while I’ve never been one to require much of it, this was far below my average.
I wake up to good news, but poor biometrics.
Biostrap is trending around the 5th spot on the front page and my HRV has plummeted.
We’ve always been told sleep is important, but you don’t realize how important it actually is until you see your HRV dip.
What’s fascinating is that we all know what being tired feels like. Just admit it…
Unfocused, lethargic, irritable —
There’s may be a million words to describe our natural responses to sleep deprivation. Quantifying that, on the other hand, put it in a new perspective.
Luckily, many of us are familiar with the hacks to making it through the day. I buckled down with a few extra cups of coffee and was ready to go.
Remaining awake and being in top mental condition are two very different things—and my HRV is an indicator of that. With only a few hours of rest, my heart was beating much more like a metronome than usual, with an HRV of ~76.
That’s a 37% percent drop—a plummet, by many standards.
Luckily, that drop in heart rate variability wasn’t in vane, with our product steadily climbing the front page, settling around the 5th spot.
So was a long day of work and a successful product launch worth the shot to my health? Absolutely. But that’s not the point, exactly.
What was fascinating about launch day was my ability to quantify what I wouldn’t otherwise be able to understand. Yes, we all have a visceral understanding of what being tired is, but putting a number to that allowed me to understand exactly where my body stood in relation to its biometric averages.
We’ll see what the rest of my startup journey has in store—definitely more sleepless nights and stressful work weeks.
Until then, I’ll try to enjoy a few extra hours of sleep and healthier HRV level.
