We launched our product on Jan 24th, 2022, celebrating the community manager appreciation day CMAD. We decided on Jan 13th. We had 11 days to plan, make videos, creatives and do pre-launch activities. Honestly, we didn't even have a hunter contact. I tweeted the decision and mentioned I would publicly document the whole journey.
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About the product
Habitate is the Andrew Garfield of community platforms. Aka, the amazing community platform. It provides an all-in-solution that includes a discussion forum, a community calendar page, and a drive to share files & folders. Also, it works on your website's custom domain.
You can learn more about the product on our website: https://www.habitate.io.
Jan 13th till Jan 23rd
The things we did
- New Landing Page and pricing, designed and developed
- Signup, create community page flow revamped
- Made a Launch Video.
- Design Creatives, Product Shots
- I kept tweeting once a day about the upcoming launch (the first tweet I made concerning documenting the journey helped me keep it going without making it look like spam)
Launch information
Product Hunt Launch URL: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/habitate
Date: Jan 24th, 2022, 12:03 am
Hunter: https://twitter.com/5harath
The Results & Stats
378 Upvotes 🚀, 99 comments 🔥, 1,157 website visitors ⚡️, 103 signups 💰, 1000+ YouTube video views ❤️.
Website traffic split:
United States 21%, India 18%, United Kingdom 9%, France 9%, Germany 7%
It launched at 12:03 am PST by Sharath from Shoutout.so
Within a couple of minutes, we got featured on the home page. I shared the news on my personal Twitter. I sent the direct link to some well-wishers, about ten people. We steadily took our place in the top 4. We stayed active in the comments replied to everything instantly. We received a substantial number of comments. I think that's super cool! There were moments when we were like 10-15 upvotes behind the first two. We will still don't want to ask our friends for help. We wanted to see what people honestly think about the product. We appreciated that we were on the home feed throughout the launch, in the top 4. When I saw a good comment, something that's enjoying what we built, I shared that on my Twitter feed again.
We took some good insights out of the comments, like these.
| Comment | Who wrote | Insight |
|---|---|---|
| This product will really minimize the clutter and will bring all the community things under one roof, and that too in one click! Amazing product. | Vaibhav Kapoor, Graphics and Tech Geek. | Product positioning and purpose were conveyed successfully. |
| Really appreciate the thoughts you guys put into developing the design. | Maurice Alexander Holtus, CEO & Co-Founder of identi | Many loved the design, user experience. |
| What a nice platform! It seems like a decent solution for community building - a lot of features are available and the design is awesome :) | Helga Razinkova, Community Manager | tons of features? Not sure if that’s a good thing. |
| This is so great, loved the design of the product, super proud of the team. | Porush Puri, Marketer and Designer | Design is well received |
| Brilliant! _ I think this is the greatest way to make a bound connection and to receive more free and more honest feedback! Amazing! Congrats on implementing this brilliant idea, and congrats on the launch! ^_^ I would truly recommend this tool | Maria, Marketing @Sealit - Email&File Encryption | Usecase of the product is conveyed and received well. |
| I absolutely love your video! I think there is value in having it on your website because people will naturally start there first when searching for an answer. Congrats on the launch! | Dawn Veltri, Director of Marketing @ RAEK | The video seems to be liked by many. We took this feedback. Added the video to our website |
| This is great! Community is important to most modern businesses, so great to see a product built for customer communities that are taking an "all-in-one" approach! | Srikrishnan Ganesan, Building Rocketlane | All-in-one! Yeah. We wanted to hear that. |
Other small wins
- We saw people sign up, create communities, customize their logos, and even add to their custom domain.
- A few reached out via LinkedIn or Twitter and booked a personal product walkthrough. ( We listed the team's social IDs in the landing page, kind of helped here)
- Got published in the Product Hunt newsletter and gained traffic for the next few days.
The Do's and Don't of PH Launch
Do's:
- Create a video explaining your product
- Signup and engage with the Product Hunt community before you hunt your product. (Give something before you decide to take)
- Please share the news on social, launch it, but don't spam it. Don't ask for upvotes, but spread the word you have launched.
- Launch on the weekdays and as early as you can. It helps you gain more eye views throughout the week.
- Mention you launched in the Product Hunt forum! The community is supportive.
- It helps if you have a ship page setup on Product Hunt. We had like 50 people subscribed. Sent message from PH tool.
Dont's:
- Ask your friends to create a new account and upvote
- Don't ask for upvotes; ask for support. It better just spread the news about the launch
- Schedule too many tasks on the same day. Keep your day open to be active on PH.
- Wait for the perfect day to launch!
Jan 25th, 2022. Celebrations begin.
I think we have done a decent job on the launch. I wanted more people to see what we built, and it happened. We celebrated back at the office. We came out of the dark fear of showing casing what we made, and that's not easy. As a creator, you always have this sense of fear of what people might think. And we broke that down.
Signing off
I'm Deepak, one of the co-creators of Habitate, the amazing community platform. I build in public, document my journey, and am open to sharing my learnings any day. I wish you all the good luck if you are planning on launching something soon. Tweet to me if it's anything related to communities, SaaS, or design.