Riliz's Product Hunt launch
The story of everything exciting and weird that happened on Riliz's launch day.
Launching on Product Hunt is no small feat.
Having read Dub.co's playbook, we fully realize that a PH can be extremely valuable for products looking for potential customers and provides exposure for the product. Riliz, being been born out of a personal need and to un-aspiring makers, did not have a strategy.
The story:
Ours was an accidental launch because one of us scheduled the launch for the next day, and after the mini-hackathon totally forgot about it the next day. Waking up to the PH email "Congratulations on your launch!".
With no other option, we quickly readied ourselves to cleanup some last minute issues and resolve some "launch-ready" tickets, to handle any incoming users.
Responses for Riliz:
One day on PH got us a lot of traffic, ...
...one paying customer, ...
... and a lot of positive responses.
Because riliz.co was compactly packaged for the right kind of audience.
Packaging for the right audience
And having created a couple of tools for the escape room and hospitality sectors, we've learned about the kind of products that prevail in these specific sectors.
Tech products that launch on Product Hunt are on a whole new level, and simple non-influencer folks need to create a product (which they obviously have a lot of fun doing), and launch sell it. Discoverability and deliverability are key to every tech creation, in this day and age. Which is also why creation is a fun journey, and sales/marketing tasks aren't as fun for the creator's mindset.
Finding the right fit for your product or packaging it for the right audience, aka barking up the right tree, gets the right kind of response and less hate and judgement. If Riliz was just packaged as a blogging platform for "everyone", the responses we'd have received would've definitely been very different. Riliz is a blogging platform, which can be used by anyone. But it was built for indie hackers and solopreneurs, like ourselves, so it saves some setup time and enables quicker sharing of product updates.
Being simple & introverted, in addition designers & developers, the creator duo are peaceful folks focussed on putting our mental well-being first. So we try design our lives accordingly. And also our products to be discoverable by it's right users, and serve their purposes.
The weird side
The impact PH has had on so many products is so unprecedented that has made way to many businesses around PH, that "help" you launch successfully with ample favourable upvotes and comments. This is something we did not know existed, until yesterday.
In addition to the website visits, upvotes and comments, we also got DMs and connection requests on LinkedIn, emails from our contact form and contact email. Majorly from Indian folks, guaranteeing upvotes and comments on Product Hunt.
Ten more of these:
Plus, a couple of emails asking if we have a bug bounty program, and a few messages blatantly asking for support on their upcoming launch, because they supposedly gave us many upvotes and comments on Riliz.
In conclusion:
Product Hunt is a great place to launch products and get some well-deserved exposure. And overall, a pretty fair place for any kind, size of product. There is no "but" coming. It just is. We at the Coduo Design Studio are creating more products and will keep launching on Product Hunt.
So you can follow the creators using these links: Indhuja & Sahil.