Hello everyone,
I'm really excited to announce the book I'm currently writing! As many of you know, I've been a really passionate Product Hunt community member: as a top hunter, moderator, and as a maker with projects like Maker Success, Maker Hunt, Product Hunt Book Club, and other initiatives. Over the past several months, I've been working directly with 100s of makers to learn more about the successes (and failures) of their launches, getting the intimate details regarding how they've managed their launches (pre-launch and post-launch), and interviewing them in an attempt to identify the most common pain points so that I could share this valuable information with the community.
I've learned some fascinating things and still learning more as I have 150+ interviews to complete. One of my favorite discoveries is the fact that a large number of makers create some of their products solely because Product Hunt exists as a channel that vastly increases the chances that their work will be seen. Things are being built that otherwise would never be created. I think that's awesome.
I've also learned that many people are still unsure about how great communities are built and the best way to leverage these communities to not only launch a product but to quickly get to product/market fit. Though a lot of the frameworks and case studies provided will be directly related to Product Hunt, I'll also be digging deeply into other communities like Kickstarter, Reddit, Hacker News, and even very nascent community-based.
I'm looking forward to sharing the insights I'm learned from the many entrepreneurs, product managers, makers, community managers, and others who have been kind enough share their thoughts and data with me. I'll be around here all day to answer any questions you may have.
@erictwillis Can't wait to see the result. Kickstarter, Product Hunt, and Hacker News were all absolutely necessary to start my company to the level of success it saw in its first year. It's a fascinating new world, and I'm glad you're telling many of the interesting stories that do need to be documented! And let me know if there's any way I can help.
@blendahtom Brands are mostly built over time so I don't think it's the most important thing to consider for a Product Hunt launch. I think a major issue that many makers deal with is that they often come to Product Hunt to get validation. They may get that from the influx of news users by either paying attention to usage patterns or directly asking those new users the important questions to understand if they're serving needs and finding out what they need to do to improve the product (and also just determining if they've built something valuable). The problem is that once they resolve the issues and push out new releases, they often feel the need to be featured on Product Hunt again because they weren't ready for growth at the time of the initial feature. Great design, ad copy, etc are important, but I think the timing of the launch plays a huge factor in what happens after being featured.
You know, Eric, when Product Hunt first started out, I thought it was a fun way to share cool products with like-minded tech nerds, but the more I used it, the happier it made me about the fact that entrepreneurs have this amazing way to be seen and heard. It's not a marketing thing, it's... someone said "it makes shit go boom", was it Snoop Dogg? 100% true.
Good luck with funding your book, I know it will be awesome! :)
@v4violetta Thanks Violeta. I think the greatest thing about Product Hunt really is the community. I don't mean the community in a sense of solely sharing products... I mean the people in a deep communal sense. I can say that, without a doubt, a large percentage of friends I've made over the last year have been because of Product Hunt in some capacity. I'm not using "friends" in a casual way either. I feel like this community attracts wonderful, intelligent, and passionate people and that's helped me grow as a person from constantly interacting with them.
@yvoschaap Bram has joined as the European community manager. I'm a moderator and not officially on the team. A number of things have changed, but it's really interesting how much more "competitive" Product Hunt has become. As the international member numbers have risen, timing has become even more important. Btw... I've shaken my addiction to being at the top of leaderboards, but you're partially responsible for my "dependency" on Product Hunt because of this: http://yvoschaap.com/producthunt/
2 things.
1: Is there going to be visuals, pictures, charts in the book and
2: are you planning an audio version if things go well? If you can't tell I'm not a reader unless it has pretty pictures in it. But I do listen :)
@raydawg88 Hey Ray. Yes, I'll be using lots of visual, pics, and charts. If I meet the funding goal, the first stretch goal will consist of an audio book reward for all backers.
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