Tapan Patel

In September 2023, I had my first launching experience in ProductHunt. It is an AI video editing tool.To avoid advertising, I won't say the name. I would like to share why it is fail even it met the goal we were looking for at that time. Why I even changed my job considering this experience, and some insights about launching Product Hunt. I hope this article can help you if you are the first time hunter to let you know what s the right thing to do! Why I launched? To won early users to give us feedback, and help us to help us work together by giving some feedback to make our products better. About the result? I won over 250 users to sign up and use our product by myself. To clarify, I won them by launching our product and promote our ProduntHunt launch page and engaging with the community all by myself. How I failed I launched on September with 52 followers, I forgot about the position. There are five of us on the project team. I am the only one who engage with the community, do marketing at social media, in another words who cares about these launch. What is the situation? I worked at an editing software company that does global business for 10 years, AIGC related product is their new project teams. Our project team is led by VP. They used to have a global business but did better in developing markets such as Asia, Africa and Latin America.However, because of the arithmetic cost of AI products and the cost of models is relatively high, so we choose to do the European and American markets. I studied in England for two years. And I have 3 years of experience in overseas projects and 2 years of entrepreneurial experience in the UK. In other words, I know the European and American markets better than he does. But when I told him to look at ProductHunt launch to make his own account on it to interact with the community before launch he just listened and didn't move. After launch, I am the one who contacts angel users to help give us some feedback one by one. After all, he's the VP and he was in charge of other products before making ours, so I asked him to contact previous users to try it out and give us feedbacks on ProductHunt.He promised and he didn't deliver the message. Actually the company I worked for is not small, it have like over 300 employees. However, they are get used to the old way they earn money by running Google ads make users purchase of membership. They have a path dependency on the original way of commercialization. So they did not think highly of ProductHunt when they doing the brand new AI project. My insights: 1.ProductHunt launch is a teamwork thing. But in my last team it looks like I am the only one who cares. 2.Making sure that all the makers in your team are sign up and engage as much as they can with the community. That is the key. 3.Connect early users to give feedback. Start running social media early, contact former users to give comments, cuz one comment equals 3 upvotes! 4.Choosing a specific launch day, I saw other hunter wrote in their insights that you can seen the You can look at the total number of products in the AI category for the day to determine the competition and then determine whether to LAUNCH! That is what I learned from my first launch experience. Hope it can help you during your first launch!