Product Hunt is a tool that has factored into my daily life for a while now. Ever since I came across it a few years ago, I had an idea percolating at the back of my head: ‘I’d love to try a Product Hunt launch one day’. Bio Cringe seemed like the right fit. It was hardly going to set the world alight, but it’s enough of a fun little tool that I thought it might gain some traction. This blog post is a deep dive into what went well, what could have gone better, and what I’ve learned from the experience.
If you’re thinking of trying your own Product Hunt launch, I hope this might help. But first, the key stats…
Bio Cringe Product Hunt Launch: Key Stats
Key Stats Breakdown
Whilst I was pleased with the overall ranking of 34 out of 74 (a mid-table finish will do me for my first go!) I had been hoping for a little more engagement. It was nice to know that people were looking at it, and I don’t mean to seem ungrateful, but good, bad or indifferent, it was the feedback I was most interested in. Shout-out to Alan Rivera for my one and only comment (which made me chuckle, and was a nice boost during the day of following the Product Hunt launch along).
I ended the day with 6 upvotes – I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d get any, so I was chuffed to bits with this. Bio Cringe is a passion project, and I knew it wasn’t going to change the World, but just knowing a handful of people had taken some time out of their day to check it out (and head back to Product Hunt to give it a thumbs up) made me smile.
Luke Dunsmore and The Tomb of the Forbidden Subject: Self-Promotion
To say I was pushed out of my comfort zone from 35,000 feet without a parachute is an understatement. I don’t traditionally excel in this area, am not a social media expert (which my rather modest Twitter following goes to show), and the thought of this element was giving me angst. Still, I felt I owed it to the product to give it a nudge elsewhere across the internet, so I dived in head first and gave it a try.
Over on Twitter, I posted the link to the tool, as well as the Product Hunt launch link, and used ChatGPT (who I affectionately call Lorna) to come up with some relevant hashtags. This World is new to me, but it was important that a) I was contributing something that I thought people might enjoy, and b) I get some practice on using Twitter effectively. Both turned out to be true, and I had a couple of messages during the day from people who had checked Bio Cringe out. Taking the plunge was worth it for that alone!
I posted Bio Cringe to some relevant communities on Reddit (r/sideproject, r/webdev) and had a mixture of instant removals (fair play, as I’m not particularly active in r/webdev for example) and bumping against the barrier. I tried to be as genuine as possible – sure, I wanted some traffic but mostly I just wondered what people thought.
A little bit of a surprise for me came from Hacker News. I posted there half-expecting a removal (which ultimately happened as someone flagged the post – still not sure which exact rule I broke but I’ll endeavour to find out), but ended up with some decent engagement:
The feedback was a mixed bag of ‘well done’, ‘this is dumb’, and ‘meh’. As I said in the beginning: good, bad or indifferent was fine for me, it was the actual feedback that was important. A big thanks to everyone over at Hacker News who took the time to check Bio Cringe out! I also had a few users who pointed out an issue with the site’s cookie banner, as well as a rather embarrassing oversight on my part in the GitHub repo’s readme file. Gaining this feedback was invaluable – so appreciate the feedback from the users who pointed these out.
What Would I Have Done Differently?
Ultimately, I don’t think this was a bad first go. Bio Cringe is meant to be fun – it was a way for me to show off and stress test my coding skills, as well as test the waters of both a Product Hunt launch and promoting a product for the first time. I’m new to the World of online promotion and the amazing communities that live and breathe these launches everyday. As a result, it became evident to me pretty quickly that the launch might have been more successful had I invested more time in initially contributing to those communities before expecting anything big from a random Product Hunt launch.
Still, I got to chat to some great people, got to check out some very cool products (special shout out to Josh Ockenden and Birthday Tracker, as well as Stefan Iftimie and the wonderful ePool tool), and had a lot of fun tracking Bio Cringe’s Product Hunt launch day all round.
Ultimately, if I could make a few people laugh, I was happy. It seems to have worked, and Bio Cringe will stay up and running as my first fun little passion project. I couldn’t be prouder.