How I launched my project on Product Hunt without moms, dads and loans

Not long ago I wrote about what conclusions I made after starting my own project from scratch. Today it’s time to continue this great story that everyone has been waiting for so long.

I’ll immediately make a reservation that on the day of the public display of my project, which was originally called Linkee, something irreparable happened, which I’ll write about in a separate post (after all, they like to read about fakaps, yeah). Therefore, it was decided to rename the project, and since the domain was purchased from me uniqorn.wsthen the project became known as Uniqorn Website.

So, the situation is as follows: I have practically no experience in launching large projects, I also have no rich parents/relatives/friends who can invest trillions in me, my personal budget is very limited, and there are competitors. After spending a month experimenting with publishing the project on different lists of indie projects and purchasing contextual advertising for unimaginable budgets ($400 for a week), I decided that I should try launching on Product Hunt. No, so what, it’s free. It's decided.

Why did I even think Product Hunt was a good idea?

I spent about a month of time and $400 money on “marketing” and publishing posts written by ChatGPT on Linkedin, and as a result I received about 100 registrations, of which 80% were Indians, two beginner online girls and two scammers. It’s not that I expected that with a near-zero budget I would have a million users in a month, but I was counting on an audience from the EU and the USA at least, but more on that in a separate post about fakapi.

In general, I was very upset, demotivated and thought that I had gotten involved in all this in vain, I had to find a second job and write code 16 hours a day for money. I wanted some positive emotions.

Launches of indie projects on Product Hunt often flash on Twitter, from time to time they become Product of the Day, everyone is happy and in general a cool whore, he wanted to try it.

Preparing for launch

I did not conduct any training as such. I had 18 followers on Twitter, about 30 people subscribed to my LinkDin page, registered users of the newsletter don’t really read (I assume they don’t, because I don’t write in Hindi), so I can’t count on their help.

In a word, I understood perfectly well that Product of the Day was not going to happen to me, but… I have nothing to lose, so why be ashamed. I collected some “promotional materials”, prepared a description via ChatGPT and told my friends that tomorrow was D-day.

Launch day. Things didn't go according to plan

When I woke up in the morning, I was sure that I had scheduled the launch for 12:00 UTC, which is about 6 am in the US, everyone will wake up, and then BAM, and my project is on Product Hunt. It turned out that I was a little slow (or the clock was changed, I still don’t understand) and my project appeared an hour later. And not on the main one. I started sending the link to friends.

Thanks to friends, a chat on Telegram and a couple of reposts on Twitter, Uniqorn Website received its 15 upvotes and, according to my logic, should have gotten to the main page, where there was a project with 9 upvotes. It turned out that everything works wrong and that you get to the main page through editors who consider whether you are worthy or not.

So, I spent half the day trying to get more upvotes, but there was no traffic to the site. Stupidly zero. It was getting towards evening, I was complaining to my friends that the world was not fair and that I was ready to abandon the project and stop trying to do something, as she wrote…

Like an angel descending from Indian heaven, Sandhya wrote to the project’s LinkDin, offering to publish a post about my project on her page for only 80 American money, which would give “about 60-80 organic upvotes” (I don’t know how organic they really were , but about five of them were later unscrewed in the end).

In general, I heard that PH has some kind of protection against cheating, but here the offer looked tempting (organic upvotes, what are you), and I didn’t really have anything to lose, because It was getting close to evening, and I only had 15-18 upvotes. And the project itself was not published on the main page.

I agreed, after which they quickly sent me a post for approval and I began to wait. A miracle did not happen, upvotes slowly began to increase, but after some time Sandhya wrote that I was not on the main page, and they often complain to her that the project does not even open on phones. Finally upset that everything was in vain and that I was cheated out of $80, I went to doomscroll TikTok and think about how I couldn’t be a successful startuper.

But the Indian princess was restless: she generated me the text of a letter that should be sent to PH support, sent the support address and said “write, everything will be fine.” I sent it (I won’t lose anything anyway) and went to bed, thinking about how cool it would be to start recording my own podcast, in which we would discuss the next successful success of yet another indie hacker infogypsy from Twitter.

The next day

I woke up as upset as possible, and since I had been very nervous the previous day, I opened my eyes two hours earlier than the alarm clock. I picked up the phone and was speechless.

Uniqorn Website was featured on the main Product Hunt. It's only begining.

To be honest, I even cried with joy (and the stress I experienced), because I was sure that it was all over, I played around and that’s enough. But three months of development were not in vain, and in general, the Indian ray of hope is top notch for the money. Seriously, if it weren’t for her, I would just cry and go tell everyone that everything was bought and that it’s hard to get to the main PH from the street if you’re not a successful Twitter indie hacker with thousands of subscribers.

PH is very interestingly designed, until approximately 12:00 (seemingly) UTC hours, all projects are in the same conditions: the number of upvotes is hidden, projects are shown in different places each time – so that there is no situation where the most popular ones become even more popular, and the guys from the bottom remain at the bottom. In fact, this is how it turns out in the end, but such a rotation brought me an additional 20 upvotes in just one morning, then, of course, the project ended up in 15th place, and by the end of the day it dropped to 20th.

But most importantly, traffic came to the site. Of course, there were no sales, it’s worth working on more, but the most important thing is that there were registrations, since on the first day there were none at all.

I won’t say that I didn’t follow what was going on at PH at all, but on this day I concentrated on being active on Twitter in order to get additional subscribers, and in general, to draw attention to the project on PH. This even yielded results: about 10 upvoters came from Twitter.

If there were no sales, why all this?

It would seem that I spent two days of my life, nervous about some numbers, on some incomprehensible site, spent $80 on Indians, and as a result made exactly zero sales. What's the point of this?

I answer:

Firstly, this is motivation to continue doing something further. Perhaps, over time, I will understand that the project is useless and needs to be closed, but it is important that the upvotes, especially in the morning, were organic, i.e. people were hooked by something (or they just put it out of pity, heh-ha), and this proves that the work was not done in vain.

Secondly, this is an experience. If I hadn’t tried to launch on PH, I would never have known that if you weren’t published on the main page, you can always write to support and maybe you’ll even get lucky.

Third, my stereotype that you have to be a successful success or have thousands or millions of investor money in order for your project to be noticed has collapsed. Because if you think about it, I really struggled with companies that have marketing budgets. And I was not in last place.

Fourthif it weren’t for the launch on Product Hunt, there wouldn’t be this post and all the possible comments from expert experts who always know better than me how it should have been done.

Interesting fact

Only at the end of the second day of launch did I realize how much I was taking a risk: the entire project was running on a home server, which is in my closet. One awkward move, power outage or internet problem and everything would go… not according to plan.

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