How to get from 0 to 0.1

James Bryce - Lind
12 replies
Hi Makers! Quarantine has been tough here in London, with limited open spaces and a general feel of zombie apocalypse in the streets. Fortunately I have found comfort in working on my passion project which I am planning to beta launch in Q4 2020. I wanted to reach out to my fellow makers and start a discussion on how and when is the best time to launch on PH? The opinions and feedback from experienced founders would be invaluable through beta testing, however with the project being a travel app there are certain, umm, limitations in the current environment and users wont be able to experience the end to end experience. Should we launch on PH without users being able to make the final purchase or wait?

Replies

Paul Odeon
Hi James - also hailing from London! Are you asking about time of day, or which day of the week? There are a number of guides out there on how to maximise your PH launch in terms of when and how to launch. I see a PH launch as a unique opportunity to generate interest in your product. As such you should already have a good few friends and family who are supportive and would come on, upvote you and hopefully allow your product to break out of its initial audience and reach a wider audience. Additionally many products that launch with a paid for element offer a discount as part of the PH launch to generate additional interest. Finally PH has their Ship product which is designed to help build interest pre-launch, which could help but you should already be building your own audience and generating interest outside of PH before launch. Hope that helps and note that I don't have experience with this but this is what I've learned from reading a fair bit about it.
James Bryce - Lind
@paulodeon such great feedback thanks Paul, definitely interested in Ship and the build towards the launch. To answer your question, I'm looking for opinions like yours on whether its worth launching the beta without the ability to make the end trip purchase? Whether you think it would be worth launching the beta, getting valuable feedback from the PH community, then relaunch with full app functionality?
Gordon Campbell
That's a great question, and something I have been wondering with my #travel website! https://www.producthunt.com/post... I know right, travel in these times? I decided to launch it anyway. A soft launch, that is. It has given me time to share with friends and family and get early feedback. Thanks to this, I've been able to fix major bugs and improve features with a small control group. No regrets! And I'm sure we will be ready for when things pick up again :)
Tamar Rucham
I think that while no one can travel atm a lot of us are dreaming of the time we can start traveling again, and perhaps lamenting the trips we were suppose to have (I will get to do my India trip some day...) I don't know what your travel tool is going to be but in the current atmosphere I think there's room for trip planners and dream builders ;) We all need something to look forward to and perhaps that's a space your tool can offer value specifically for now.
Sterling Sansing
I have had several vacations planned this year that got canceled. My girl and I are still actively planning our next vacation. If you have a cool vacation planner application that would allow you to track pricing for desired dates then I would be interested in test driving it. I firmly believe there is lots of room to grow in the vacation planning sector. So I would say launch it.