[THREAD] About my @ProductHunt launch. Yesterday(October…

This thread will be about what I went through as a rookie and what I have learnt from this first experience.

First things first. I think launching a product on PH is stressful for everyone, but i had a whole another stress because of two things:

I am a student and I live in France, so when I posted on PH just after midnight for San Francisco time, it was early in the morning here.
So I was in class using my school computer, refreshing time to time to see how @makertask is doing 😅
Let me show:

It was important for me to be online and aware of whats going on around my product, for a few reasons all first timers should be careful about:

1)Our products as indies can almost never be perfect at launch, so it mat crash, server can go down, someone could attack your website.

About that last one by the way. Although yeah most people are awesome and are willing to try your project peacefully, give feedback and help you out. Some people are just bad, and will try SQL injections, spam your contact forms..
For example, my email forms were attacked via jS:

I rapidly understood how the attacker was doing this so easyly, and i rapidly fixed this.

2nd) reason you should be available is to promote your producthunt page anywhere you can. I know almost noone but @yesnoornext @marie_dm_ @firatdemirel were among those who gave me a push🙏🏻

Their initial RT and favs placed me to between 10-20 ranking rapidly. From there producthunters I don’t even know upvoted my product frequently enough for me to keep 15th place for a longtime.

This is important because, if you are among top 20, you are more visible

That's me recording a video in french (sorry about that), to explain my girlfriend why I am so excited about being before the "Show more"

Anyways, my kinda not bad ranking helped me get these results:

Lots of things I don't know about analytics. I don't know what is good, what isn't. But one thing I am sure of is the 52% rebound date. That means half the traffic I had just saw my landing page and quit right after 🤨

At some point in the day, it was around 8:00 in the morning for San Francisco, and my traffic was increasing more and more, but nothing was happening, The only 2 tasks listed on makertask were mine. This sucked, because there wasn't enough content for people to see.

I knew I had to change something. I asked a few designers in a slack chat and found out the way I explained what makertask was about wasn’t clear for most of them. It was lunchtime and I was getting back home in a tramway🚈.
I updated my homepage, and the whole About this page.

Below is a comparison of the first and updated version of my landing page.

LEFT(Updated, actual) / RIGHT(old, first version)

I had asked in the designers slack group I mentioner earlier in this thread, "Why everyone quits my page right after landing, what should I change in my design ?"
And someone answered: Your design has no value if your wording sucks. Huge thumbs up to that guy from Vancouver. 👍

Notice how I only added a few emojis to make it more attractive and changed the whole "About makertask" to "👉How it works." ?

All this happening while I was in the tramway for around 45 mins btw(You can't afford to lose that time when you are on PH and have class all day long).

Here is what that gave me.

The plan for me was to take the user from index.php(landing) to about.php(where I explain how this collaborative platform works) to finally 👉🏻free.php

LEFT(about.php) / RIGHT(free.php)

And it began working🚀🚀.

Here you can see free.php and about.php were among the most visited pages right after the landing page.

(For your information, the ref producthunt link landed to index.php so to my landing page)

Free.php is the page where makers fill the form and list a new task on makertask. As more people visited this page, the first task from someone other than me was listed.

I also found out, someone hunted makertask on a website I didn’t even know existed.

You know when you launch a product and results come slowly(that is most of the time!!), you begin doubting about your product.

These kind of feedbacks help you stay strong in the game.

Don’t hesitate to take a few minutes and tell a maker their product is good if you think it.

Than it was late in France (past midnight).

So I slept.
And woke up to more producta listed.

Througout today(day after launch) I still have quite good traffic(250+ visitors, 10% returning users)

And as of right now there are 6 tasks paying a total of 380$ + ?

I believe the story of my launchday ended now.

A few hours ago a developer from India sent an email through my website to @jeffeisley to help him about a custom ghost theme he needs.

This is awesome. This is why I have built @makertask

It feels good to know what I took the time and effort to build actually has the potential to help both a maker and a developer who maybe just needs some cash.

If you have a task you would pay to get done with too,

or if you can translate a chinese app to english for 100$ 🤑

This is made for you👇🏻

https://t.co/KtcpRacrqA