Diary Of A Launch
A Minute-by-minute Account of Getting to #1 on Product Hunt
On Monday I launched Brick By Brick, a free guide about building successful communities, featuring advice from people such as Justin Kan and Pieter Levels.
I think it’s safe to say the launch was a success. But before I talk more about that, let me go back a little.
The Problem
It all started a few months ago. I was working hard on Telescope (a free open-source app that lets you launch your own Hacker News or Product Hunt), and the project was slowly gaining traction.
But new Telescope users were always confronted with the same problem: launching a new community is easy, but actually making it work is another problem altogether.
Most people (me included!) just have no idea how to grow an active, engaged community. So most sites get a big boost at launch, and then slowly became ghost towns as the novelty wears off.
To combat this, I decided write a simple guide to community building basics for new Telescope users (or anybody else, actually).
And as a bonus, the guide itself would also end up promoting Telescope to the outside world.
Writing Process
I’m a big believer in the value of side projects. In fact, you could say my “career” as an entrepreneur was built on side projects like Patternify, The Toolbox, or my UI design ebook.
I even have a theory about side projects: you should go from idea to launch in 10 hours.
So even though in total I ended up spending way more than 10 hours on this guide, I did do the first 80% of the work in just two afternoons, about a month ago.
Doing that initial burst of effort in one go let me see right away that I had something valuable there, which is always the best antidote for doubt and demotivation.
Small Scope, Big Project
Although I made sure to restrict the scope of the project (I’ve seen too many projects fail to launch because of an ever-expanding list of features), I didn’t want to skimp on polish.
So the project ended up taking quite a bit more time than I had anticipated, but hopefully it ended up being worth it.
Here are a few of the things I worked on.
Typography
I spend quite some time on getting the typography right, and ended up selecting three fonts.
I used Sullivan for section headings, layering each word three times in two different font styles (using CSS pseudo-elements) to achieve that 3D effect.
I also used Kulturista for smaller headings, and Brandon Grotesque for body copy (served from Typekit).
With both Kulturista and Sullivan, I wanted to achieve an industrial, workmanlike feel to stick with the construction theme.
Brandon admittedly doesn’t really fit in with this direction, but it’s a typeface I’ve always wanted to use so I ended up picking it anyway to round up the trio.
Icons
I also spent some time finding the right icons for the project. I was lucky enough to have my friend Vincent Le Moign offer me an exclusive peek at his upcoming new icon set.
As soon as I saw them, I knew they’d be perfect. The angular look matched the site’s industrial feel perfectly, and what’s more there was already a set of construction-related icons!
At the time I actually didn’t have the name “Brick By Brick” yet, but it ended up all coming together nicely.
Social
I also did my best to make the content viral and shareable. Instead of a simple tweet button, I included a custom-coded tweet field. I don’t have hard data, but I suspect people will be more willing to tweet out a link if they can see what they’ll be tweeting out first.
And hey, custom code means no nasty Twitter tracking code!
I also tried something new: letting people tweet out key highlighted sentences throughout the guide:
As it turns out, this didn’t really work out. The highlight was probably too subtle, and since the tweet icon only appeared on hover the effect was lost on most people (especially those reading on mobile).
Lesson learned: next time, I’ll make sure to be more obvious!
PDF Version
I also knew people like to download content to read it later, so I generated a PDF version as well.
There’s no secret here: I simply set up a print stylesheet, and then used my browser’s Print As PDF feature!
So far the PDF has been downloaded over 2500 times, so it was definitely worth it (in fact, I even received an email from Dropbox saying I was abusing their service by generating so much traffic!).
The Launch
This brings us to the big day: The Launch.
I had a single objective for this launch, which was to do well on Product Hunt. As you’ll soon see, I think it’s safe to say I accomplished that goal.
Why Product Hunt? Simply because its audience is precisely the kind of people I wanted to reach: entrepreneurs who might be interested in building communities and learning more about Telescope.
So I ended up posting the link to Product Hunt at 5:50PM Japanese time (I live in Osaka) on Monday. Here’s a breakdown of what happened after.
5:50PM
Submitted the site to Product Hunt.
6:00PM
8 upvotes already. Is that a lot? That seems like a lot.
Product Hunt is done, time to set up TweetDeck to see if people are sharing the link.
6:06PM
Even though it’s 2AM in the U.S. where Product Hunt is based, someone apparently found the time to officially add me as a maker for my submission. These people never sleep!
6:07PM
The link has been submitted to Designer News. Now frantically refreshing both Product Hunt and Designer News.
6:17PM
19 upvotes on Product Hunt already, which nets me the #2 spot! Time to send an email to my own email list (5685 subscribers at the time of writing) to tell them about the project.
6:24PM
111 simultaneous users on the site according to Google Analytics. It’s all just dumb HTML so I don’t have to worry about scaling. I see the link has also been posted to Hacker News a while back, but didn’t get any upvotes.
6:33PM
122 users on site. The site is number one on both Product Hunt and Designer News!
6:53PM
I email a few friends, asking them to share the link if they enjoyed the guide.
7:04PM
The site briefly makes the Hacker News front page at #29, before disappearing forever in limbo.
7:26PM
Still #1 on both Product Hunt and Designer News. Time to take a break to watch some House of Cards.
2:54AM
I wake up in the middle of the night. I can’t sleep, so I give in and get up to go watch Twitter and answer comments. The site is still going strong on Product Hunt!
7:00AM
After barely getting enough sleep, I wake up to find the guide still number one on Product Hunt by a sizeable margin. And it’s still in first place as I’m writing these lines!
Mission accomplished!
Conclusion
Of course, it remains to be seen what people actually do with the guide. But I think it’s fair to say the launch itself was very successful.
Thanks again to Justin, Pieter, Josh, Ryan, Jean-Nicholas, Kelly, and the other Justin for contributing to the guide.
And thanks to everybody who shared it, retweeted it, and downloaded it!
