My First SaaS Launch Just Failed (Or not?)

After building and launching 4 B2C macOS apps, I decided to release one of our internal tools that helps us evaluate and track marketing channels.

Days of preparing for the launch, setting up onboarding, landing page, redesigning the dashboard, testing, and more.

Converting an internal tool built for our needs into a standalone product is not as straightforward as you might think.

The deadline was set.
Monday 20th of Jul.
I announced hackathon weekend: finish the launch checklist no matter what.

Time was running out.
Sunday came with half the list still to do.
After a full day and a half night, working almost non-stop, at 2:00 everything was done.

Launch Day

Woke up ready to send the launch link for everyone I know,
Upvotes started to go up,
But halfway into the day, the picture began to reveal itself.
We are not going to finish in the top 10, and even worse, only 2 signups for our new product.

Final score 🥲

350 Visitors, 2 signups, endless disappointment.

BUT here is the plot twist 😁

What if the goal for this launch wasn't customers?

Launching a new SaaS product on Product Hunt that targets B2B, with subscription payments and no initial customers or community, hoping for customers is the longest long shot a builder can take.

And I know it already.

This is not my first B2B startup,
I already built a company that reached 30K MRR before and sold it to a big public company in an 8-figure deal.
We didn't launch that product on Product Hunt at all, no Ads or hundreds of dollars of cold email campaigns.
It was raw, door-by-door, month-to-month, attending conferences, SEO, and more real, physical-world marketing.

This is how I know to market B2B products.

So why launch LnkFlow on Product Hunt when I know it will probably lead to nothing?
Because I wanted to run a real-life test of how our new product can help me, and others, find the marketing channels that really work!

Set Up the Scene

We started this launch by finding a few influencers to help us gain more exposure for the launch page and product page.
Each one should get 2 links, one for our homepage and one for our Product Hunt launch.
So the first challenge was ready: how to create this campaign and all the links for each one of them fast.
The answer: LnkFlow MCP integration 🤩

2 prompts, and done.
The campaign was created, the influencer was created with all the needed metadata, links were generated, and I got a file ready to send.
And I felt just like I want our future customers to feel.

Using this method, we generated all the necessary links for this launch and started putting them everywhere we could.
Each channel had its own subdomain, so it was super easy to track everything and see it all in a clean way.

Getting the results

After a few hours, we already started to get valuable data.

Some promising cooperation brought ZERO clicks.
Literally ZERO.
Something that we didn't have any way to know before.
Some channels worked very well, but the funniest one was one of our Reddit posts.
We got zero comments or upvotes, but thanks to the tracking link we were able to write this comment:

And get some feedback back 😄

The long tail effect

Another perk of using LnkFlow is that we can see how the link performs over time. Even on non-launch days, I can see clicks, and over the long run I will be able to get a better understanding of channel performance.

So what now?

Now it's time to real B2B marketing.
What worked for us on our B2C apps will not work on this one.
This required a different approach, but one I already know.
Just need to remove some rust 😁

I will share more here, but to provide interesting content, I need to grow my business through real marketing channels.

The REAL work just began.
Let's go 🚀