My First Product Hunt Launch Experience

So... My Product Hunt launch of Purgo flopped miserably 😅 and I don't even think my goals were unreasonable. But that's all right, doesn't mean I'm salty or anything, I didn't expect much. But it is funny when compared with my Hacker News post.

My goals for Product Hunt

Given that it was my first launch, my goals for PH weren't anywhere near aiming for Product of the Day or even the top 10. Would've been nice, of course, but my main goals were:

🙋‍♂️ Get at least a couple of people to try it out
💬 Get some real feedback
⭐️ And the best outcome would be to get a few ratings in the App Store

The results

One person activated the free trial, no feedback, no ratings 😅

I mean, I get that Purgo isn’t a groundbreaking idea or anything new, but when I compare the effort I put into the PH launch vs the time I spent on the HN post, it’s definitely not proportionate. At least from HN, I got a few users downloading the app and one comment with actionable feedback.

Takeaways

I’ve learned a few things from this, though - I'd been kind of "scared" to put any product on PH for a long time, thinking "What will people say?", "What if it is not good enough for PH?" and all the usual BS you tell yourself - turns out, the worst thing that can happen is… literally nothing lol, because that’s exactly what happened 😄 and it’s really not that bad.

So in the end, an interesting experience - PH is great for putting yourself out there, setting a deadline, and packaging your product nicely. And if you have an interesting product and a bit of luck, you might even land an award. But it shouldn’t be treated as some holy grail.

I know many people say you shouldn’t rely too much on PH, but I guess you just have to try it for yourself haha.

Thanks for reading and now I'll get back to it! A lot of other things I wanna try and when it comes to PH, who knows, maybe next time I'll have a bit of luck 🤘

Until next time,
Tony