My experience going from idea to #3 on ProductHunt in under a month
On September 14th I created a folder called “finish me” on my desktop.This was the start of another silly idea that was going to distract me from the idea I was already working on (and grow into the #3 product on ProductHunt less than a month later).
My idea was aimed at solving a problem I had seen time and time again. You go to share an article on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn only to find out the preview generated for the link is missing an image, or is lacking a captivating title/description.
I decided I would build a link shortener that allows the user to edit the meta tags used to generate these previews. I picked the name MetaShort and bought the domain https://metashort.co. My next step was to create an MVP plan for myself. Once I finished every item on the list, I would force myself to release. A trap I often fall into is developing a working version of my idea, only to abandon it in my projects graveyard without ever showing a single person. The MVP plan (and my “finish me” folder) eventually forced me to escape this trap and release MetaShort.
For the technical aspect of MetaShort I decided to go for the most simplistic approach possible (aka the levels.io approach). No complicated frameworks, build tools, etc. The backend is PHP with MySQL. Frontend views are rendered with Twig templates. The little Javascript I use is with jQuery. Everthing is compiled with the awesome Codekit app. This approach let me reach my MVP in about 3 weeks (and it would have been faster if I hadn’t redesigned the site half way through).
While building the project, I started promoting it using ProductHunt Ship. This helped me to assemble a list of people interested in the idea of MetaShort. Once I had something useable, these wonderful people gave feedback and helped me improve what I had built. I also got feedback from Reddit and Twitter to further validate and improve the idea before launch.
The ProductHunt launch on October 12th took me completely by surpise. I was watching my Google Analytics (which up to that point consisted of a few people I had invited) when I started to notice /?ref=producthunt referals. I pretty much went into full “oh shit” mode at that point. ProductHunt gives you a countdown until your post is featured, and I had less than 10 hours to get MetaShort ready for launch.
I used this 10 hours to touchup the interface (as much as possible) and add a ProductHunt specific welcome message. I also threw in an on-site chat from the wonderful smallchat. I spent way too long agonizing over the tagline, description and first comment on the ProductHunt post (more emoji = better). Finally I threw together some screenshots and created an animated gif for the icon (the animation editor in Photoshop sucks).
By the time I headed off for bed, traffic had already started to trickle in. When I woke up, traffic had exploded. The chat widget was blowing up, people were commenting on the ProductHunt post, Twitter posts were sharing MetaShort, and articles were appearing around the web about the service.
Launch day resulted in ~1,300 visitors to the site. Over 500 links were submitted with around 2,100 meta tags. I had great conversations with numerous people through the site chat, and was even able to catch a few issues. Unfortunately only a single person signed up for the 30 day pro membership trial though.
Traffic was still high for the next couple of days, and then slowly started to die down (it sits at about 40 visitors/day now with about 38 sites submitted). Most people seemed to be very into the idea. That said, a lot of the sites created around the launch period were just tests (the user didn’t edit any meta tags, they just entered the link to see what would happen). This, combined with the disappointing pro membership numbers, showed me that a) my marketing lingo homepage wasn’t working and b) the value of the product wasn’t obvious enough.
My first post-launch step was to massively simplify the homepage. I removed all the marketing text and replaced it with a few concise sentences that described the product. I also added real examples of people using MetaShort to demonstrate how it can be valuable.
Going forward, I’m going to keep improving the site and engaging with users. I’ve had a few more pro subscribers since launch, but the number is still low. My traffic is also very low (although I do have some consistent users), so I need to focus on promotion as well (which I’m terrible at). I love seeing people use MetaShort, and really hope it can prove useful to more people!
