How we screwed up our first Product Hunt launch

Medium post here

The purpose of this post is to explain how we launched our first product on Product Hunt and how we screwed our launch day. Hopefully it will help others not make the same mistakes that we did.

Background

The product we launched was called Ninja Masker (now Burner Mail) — a simple tool that lets you generate a random email address on the spot when signing up for websites. The team behind Burner Mail is me, Alexandra (22 years old software engineer) and Serge (24 years old software engineer). We started working on the product as a side project and before the launch I had quit my full time job while Serge was working part time.

The Launch

We decided to launch on Product Hunt after a beta launch on Reddit. We were confident in our software as well as the value of the product. We decided to hunt the product ourselves since most of the articles we read on launching said that the person who hunts the product isn’t important anymore.

Here’s what we had planned:

Title: Ninja Masker
Tagline: Prevent your email address from being sold
Description: Ninja Masker helps protect your identity and prevents spam by generating masks for email fields on websites.

The Product Hunt post can be found here.

Everything looked great from out point of view, yet we didn’t manage to make it to the front page. While products that were posted later than us were making their way up, we were drowning at the end of the list. So what exactly was going on, what did we do wrong?

#1 Mistake

Bad marketing. Our post sounds very “techy” and not at all simple. We used technical terms and concepts that everyday internet users did not understand. Our value proposition was: “a simple tool that lets you generate single purpose email masks that forward all incoming emails to your personal account”. We didn’t use simple words. We tried to sound smart and techy. People didn’t understand the concept of the product. What is a ninja mask? What does it do? How do I use it?

Any user should understand at first glance what your product is, how it works and why they should use it. When it comes to Product Hunt, you’re competing with dozens of other products. The user is not going to read your 5 sentence explanation. If you didn’t explain the product with your name, image and tagline you’re done. No one is going to click on the product post to read your maker comment or go to your website.

A better name and explanation of our product could have been:
“Burner Emails — a tool to create burner email addresses that forward emails to your personal inbox and hide your real email address from the internet”

#2 Mistake

Quality over quantity. Our mistake was was sending the launch email to our subscribers and posting to Facebook/Twitter right after the launch. It was a mistake because we received a good amount of votes in the first two hours after launching. The problem with those votes was that they were mainly new or small accounts.

It is very honourable that your users and friends are willing to create an account to support you, and I want to thank everyone who took the time to support us on Product Hunt, however, 5 organic votes from active Product Hunt users would have helped us more than 50 friends votes. That being said, it doesn’t mean you have to hide your launch from people. What would have been better for us was to wait for a few organic votes and comments before getting tractions from subscribers.

My suggestion is to wait for a few organic votes, maybe even wait to make it on the popular section, and only then start sending emails, tweets and ask people to check you out. The number of votes is not everything for the Product Hunt algorithm, the consistency of votes throughout the day is as important. In order to achieve consistency, you can divide your email list in 4 or 5 sections and send the emails every 1 or 2 hours throughout the day. Same with posting to Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Post to one social account every hour or so.

#3 Mistake

Not genuine. Don’t try to sound smart, markety, techy or selling. At this point you should sound as genuine and simple as possible. Be nice, respond polite and act humble.

Our description: “Spam is still a thing. We built Ninja Masker to try and prevent it. Spam is like a disease, it’s better to prevent than to cure. Ninja Masker lets you generate single purpose email masks that forward all incoming emails to your personal account. It helps you become anonymous, protect your inbox, get rid of spam more easily and it lets you have more free time. Don’t regret giving away your personal email address, use a mask instead.”

We sound very cocky and selling. We don’t sound like nice, genuine people.

A better description could have been: “We build this app out of our own frustrations with spam and privacy issues. Our tool lets you receive your emails in your personal inbox while hiding your real email address from the internet. The main benefit of using our tool is that it protects your inbox from spam and yourself from identity theft.”

#4 Mistake

Giving everything away. We had a huge makers comment. Everybody says to write this big comment where you explain the idea, benefits, the story and what’s next but if you do so (and we did), you leave no room for comments.

And people didn’t comment because everything was there. There were no questions to ask. We explained how it works, the benefits of using it, why we made it, what features we want to add next, where we see the product going. You need to leave some room for questions.

You should leave a comment to tell people that you are interested in their feedback and that they should comment if they have any questions, but that’s it. Let them ask you questions because the Product Hunt algorithm takes the number of comments into consideration. You see products on a higher place with fewer upvotes but more comments on a daily basis.

#5 Mistake

Timing is everything. We didn’t launch right away when the next day started. We launched at 1:36 PM which gave other products a big head start in getting way more votes before us. You should make sure that you launch as early as possible to get enough votes to make it to the front page.

#6 Mistake

Not enough feedback. Most of our feedback came from early adopters that are mainly tech people. We didn’t think to try and reach out to non-technical users. We made sure that the UX was good, that people find it easy to use and valuable, that the app was fast and bug free, however, we didn’t ask how easy it is to understand what it does and why you would use it.

We should have asked for feedback from a more generic user base and also get feedback regarding our marketing strategy. We are tech people, we couldn’t see from a non-technical users’s point of view. We couldn’t foresee that most people would not understand the core concept of the product.

Reddit is a great place to ask for feedback. Find your general target audience and see on what subreddits they hang out. From there, you can just ask for feedback or any other questions. In general, people like giving feedback to new tools and ideas.

#7 Mistake

Problem solving. We didn’t specifically address the problem we are solving. We only said that spam is still a thing and that you should protect your inbox. We didn’t let users identify with the core problem and we gave no indicators to whether they need our solution or not.

You should be as explicit as possible to what problem you are solving and give direct examples to make the user relate to it.

We said that we help prevent spam. While most people can relate to spam we weren’t convincing enough to exactly why you should use our tool, how we solve that problem. We didn’t educate the user to what spam is and help him figure out if he is facing the issue we are trying to solve.

A better approach would have been to market ourselves as a privacy tool. We protect your inbox from spam, “broken” unsubscribe buttons and unwanted ads, however we also protect your from scams and identity theft. We should have explained how and educate users on why they should care about their privacy. More and more services sell their data (email lists) and more and more services have data breaches. When that happens, you become a target for scammers because they have access to your email address. If the data breach also includes your password and you made the mistake to use the same password for multiple services, then you become an easy target for hackers that will be trying to take over your personal account. From there it’s easy-peasy: Paypal, crypto currency wallets/assets, you name it. When you are using our tool, you are not giving away your personal email address to strangers. Even if there is a data breach with your burner email address, people cannot get control of your personal account because they don’t know your real address.

You need to let your users know exactly the issue you are solving, how you are solving it and educate them on the topic. You need to answer the user’s dilemma of “Do I need this product?”

Conclusion

The most important things are to:

• market yourself right
• address the issue you’re solving and how you are solving it
• use simple words
• sound nice and genuine
• answer all your potential customers questions like Do I need this product? Is it solving a problem that I have?

I hope that you’ll take away some valuable advice from this post and you won’t make the same mistakes that we did.

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