All right.
Um yeah, happy to walk through the product on post um for our initial launch.
So here's what the post looks like.
Um you know, savvy cattle name of the product, sending your scheduling link shouldn't feel weird.
That's the headline that we use on our website and sort of that speaks to that positioning that we wanted to uh to try to cast here.
Um and on this, this section right below the header, um you can post screenshots and you can optionally add a video and I think it's kind of best practice to include basically have a simple walk through the product, a demo specifically for the product trump community.
So I kept it to just under three minutes and um didn't didn't put a lot of production value into this.
Honestly, I just used screen flow and kind of um walked through some of the basic features of the product and said like, you know, hey, product hunt here are some things I think you might find interesting about savvy cal and just gave basically a live demo of the product there and then created some of these other screenshots, um just sort of using a design motif that's on our website and highlighting some um some pretty what we thought our compelling features and differentiators.
Um the section pretty pretty brief here below, speaking to the the key value proposition.
And then um and then yeah, the first comment which you're allowed to to basically post when you when you schedule the post, you can also schedule in the the first comment from the maker.
And so this is this is copy that Corey helped to write.
But basically introducing, you know, me as the maker.
Here's a little bit about me, here's the problem that we're solving and here's the solution.
You can use some little formatting bits in here, like you can bold text, they don't give you full html support, but you can you can add some of these little highlights to call things out, which is kind of nice.
Um so the Product hunt page, we linked out to um specifically a Product Hunt landing page.
So that's what that looked like.
And we basically just copied the home page and I added this little this little banner here to call out that they're coming from Product Hunt.
And this made it really easy to segment in analytics and look at the traffic that was coming from the slash product hunt um landing page.
And we also um product that gives you badges, you can embed.
So I think we had this on this page higher up at one point, but now it just kind of lives in the footer and it basically shows uh you know, how many up votes were getting and that sort of helps um dr excitement and uh hopefully encourages people to uh to give us an up vote.
Um and this is the planning doc that cory and I used together.
So um kind of started with our basic listing information and this is uh this is kind of a format that we use to send over to heat and um you know, we wanted to give him the name, tag line website description to put in some topics um for categorizing on product hunt, um you can give a few other relevant links, so we linked to our cal only alternative page and um and our initial launch post, that sort of outlined five reasons why you might find Sadiq Al compelling.
So just really driving home are differentiators and then this walkthrough video and we also gave gave heat in a google drive folder, I think that contained the images that we wanted him to to put um in the little carousel and here's the first comment and we planned out the website banner.
So this is that that custom copy to put on the landing page, let me sort of just hammered out a loose timeline here.
We basically said like, okay, last week of december about we week and a half ahead of the product launch, Go ahead and announce that on twitter, I'm not sure where um where that tweet is, I might be able to dig that up a little bit um and then mention it on the podcast.
Um also and I was, I was a little worried actually, I Corey and I talked about this a little bit that someone might kind of try to scoop the launch and posted early on product hunt and um I think basically if that were to happen, you can kind of reach out to the product hunt team and say like, hey, we're planning to launch on this day and they're usually willing to help you out, I think so, um I was worried about that, Corey was like, I don't think that's too big of a concern, like um you can go ahead and be, you know, be pretty public about saying like we're going to be on product hunt soon without too much worry there.
Um and so yeah, we plan to to publish it on the seventh, so day before um we announced again on twitter, we're gonna be on product on and then scheduled a tweet to go out on the several minutes after after midnight pacific time on launch day.
And also I think Corey mentioned this to that, we tried to get, you know, all the places where people are seeing me online or seeing the product, getting everything pointing to the product front page.
So we updated the, the kind of bios on twitter and everything to try to like drive people towards the product on page and all the Urals and stuff.
Um This is the newsletter that went out and I sent this to the entire customer base, anyone who had tried the product um and also to my personal personal newsletter list and sort of subject line savvy calzone products, you know, very straightforward um straight to the point and tried to tell a little bit of a compelling journey story here, just distilling down what's been going on in the last, you know, the last couple of years building up to this moment.
And um so we kept it kept it decently short here, um to a little bit of back story, and then got right to the heart of it of, you know, the core thesis behind behind savvy cow and this is an important thing.
You never want to ask for up votes, you may want to make sure to uh ask for support, I think is allowed Burbage or you can say, you know, go there, leave a review.
Um you can ask people to leave reviews, but you don't wanna you don't want to say like go up boat us, um that's sort of against against products hunts terms and I think that could get you pulled off the front page potentially, so don't want to do that, but you can uh you can safely drive people to your product on page.
I know other, you know, hacker news, if you're doing that, that the algorithm knows if people go directly there and they'll they'll kind of penalize you for that and product to my knowledge doesn't do that.
So, so we just linked straight to that page, sent people there and this was the tweet we sent uh savvy callous on product hunt, sort of, just a little a little timeline of of how the how development went and that got quite a few, quite a few likes and retweets got showed around a bit people eager to, to help out.
Um, and celebrate the launch.
I also did a similar post on linkedin.
Um, I don't, I don't spend a lot of time personally on linkedin, but I've found actually people talk about cervical quite a bit on linkedin and those posts a lot of times get a lot of engagement.
So it's odds on my list actually to uh, to see if we can be more delivered about, about utilizing linkedin in the future.
But um, we, we went ahead and cross posted there as well, and that definitely helped drive in traffic.
Um, Corey and I also kind of just cobble together a list of the communities that were in, you know, slacked communities, um, and ask folks there to show their support and kind of did, I did a little bit of outreach of this kind to, it's always smart to like think about who's in your immediate personal network that is willing to go and kind of help you seed your post and leave initial um, initial comments and things there.
And so I definitely dm probably about 10, people just saying like, Hey, this is happening.
If you could, if you go and show your support, that would be, that would be awesome.
Um, we also, yeah, we promoted the tweet, I think we just put a little bit of money into it.
I don't know if that really paid off, but it definitely drove some engagement with the tweet.
So a cheap, relatively cheap way to potentially help amplify on, on twitter.
Um yeah, and then kind of throughout the day I was trying to think of ways to um to kind of keep this top of mind for people, you know, it went out, the initial tweet went out midnight and so a lot of people in the US weren't necessarily awake when it went out.
Maybe they would, maybe the algorithm would surface it to them when they woke up, but I wanted to make sure to kind of keep keep dripping things out a couple times throughout the day on twitter and so we kind of came up some ideas, do a tweet thread about what makes a vehicle unique um kind of tweet progress on like, hey this is our current standing on product hunt right now, like try to try to get people to um to feel a sense of momentum and want to come and help out.
And so I think we did kind of an early morning thread, did a an afternoon thread kind of highlighting differentiators, just just, you know, thinking about some creative ways to uh, to keep Savin hill top of mind on that day and then you did an evening threat as well.
And right at the end of the day, there was kind of a late rally from someone else who was launching on there the same day.
So we did a little bit of a last ditch effort tweeting like, hey, we're so close, like I'm sure your support and I think that that worked a little bit, but honestly, even though we ended number two of the day, it was still um, still a very, very successful launch.
Uh Corey might have ideas about what we would do differently.
I honestly feel really good about how things went.
I think, um, I think it was evident that like some of the people we were competing with on the day of, we're probably, you know, paying for one of those services to help you, uh amplify your lunch and noticed actually kind of vote counts were jumping around a bit like someone be up by 100 100 votes and then the algorithm would kind of correct it and clean out some of like bot votes or whatever.
So anyway, I'm not a fan of like trying to game the system too much.
I think I feel pretty good about the way we did it.
It was organic and you know, not not using any kind of gray hat techniques and I think that's probably the way to go