Derrick Reimer & Corey Haines discuss launching SavvyCal on Product Hunt

Hey brian from zip message here, I've got another one of these asynchronous conversations happening on zip message and I'm talking to folks who are shipping really awesome inspiring work.

And of course I had to invite my friend Derek Reimer on the show, he's like the shipping master when it comes to, to designing building marketing product along with Corey Haines.

He is the marketer extraordinaire who is working with Derek on the rollout of savvy cal it's, it's a wonderful product, I'm a customer.

Uh it's really great for, you know, inviting others to book time on your calendar in many ways.

I find it it's like a nice compliment to using zip message.

You know, these two products kind of work really nicely hand in hand together.

The thing that I wanted to really talk to, both Derek and Corey about has been there uh launch of Savage.

How on Product hunt? It's something that we all see in our circles, you know, these products, you know, rising the ranks of, of Product Hunt, Derek and Corey, I believe it was last year when it, you know, Savage how really did well on Product hunt with the initial launch.

But then lately I've seen them do something interesting, which is they continuously repost on Product hunt every time they launch a new feature in savvy house.

So I want to ask all about how they went about executing the initial product launch and the subsequent product launches the strategy around communicating and implanting it and optimizing for success on product hunt because, you know, a lot of times it can kind of feel like a crapshoot.

So, so that's really my first question, I've got a number of questions that where we're going to dig into the details of how this stuff was executed.

But the very first one I want to ask both of you, you know, Derek and maybe Corey can chime in after Derek.

Um what were the initial results from that first big product launch in terms of traffic to the site, number of trials, customer or mrr growth, anything that you can share? Um and I believe you got to number one on product hunt.

Right.

So can you talk about like, what does that look like for a product like yours? Um if someone else's product were to rise to that rank, what types of results can they do you think that they could probably expect? Um and then sort of the same question for for those more recent product launches, the ones where you're launching a new feature or a new integration on product and what's been the impact of of those? And how did how did those perform compared to the very first one.

So after that we're going to dig into the details and go back to how you planned it.

All right, Thanks folks.

Oh, and by the way, I forgot to got to mention again, this is on zip message, we're going to start to publicize this conversation after we get through a few of these questions and if you're seeing this, you know, you can watch through all these answers.

And if you have a question for Derek Corey or myself, you can ask your question right here into zip message.

Just record your camera or your microphone or your screen and you don't need to download or install anything.

Um it'll come right in here and it will notify us.

So, um, and if and you know, maybe later when we turn this into a podcast episode on the ship podcast, maybe your question will even make it into that.

All right, Thanks books over to you, Derek and Corey, See you

Hey brian and everyone, thanks for thanks for having me on here to chat a bit about the Product hunt launch for savvy cow.

Um so yeah, as you mentioned, we we launched the Product officials on on Product Hunt on january 7th of this past year and it turned out to be, I will say a bit more successful than I imagined it would be.

Um we kind of went into the launch thinking that, you know, this would at the very least be uh an opportunity to make a big splash and hopefully drive some attention and some traffic to the product.

And it turned out being um actually quite quite a big lift on, You know, traffic to the website and um Mrr growth.

So to share some of the numbers um on on the day of, we got 1900, just over 1900 up votes, which drove about 10,000 unique visitors to the website.

Uh we got several 100 comments.

Um in part, some of those were us participating in the comment thread and a lot of them were just kind of organically people chiming in.

Um this led to about 3000 people are registering for the product and at the end of january, we jumped RMR are by about three grand, so we're up to 4000 mrr um by the end of launch month.

So totally um blue, any of my expectations out of the water.

And I think some things contributed to that, that are probably worth mentioning.

Um one we we kind of waited a few months after launching to our launch list before putting it on product hunt.

Um and I think this was really important because you know, when you present it to the product community, there's a lot of people who are kind of discerning about um about the products they want to see there and if your product is too young then um you know, it can end up getting kind of heavily scrutinized and not taken very seriously and so we wanted to make sure that we had strong answers to questions like how is cervical different than the other major tools on the market? Um And we had competitor comparison pages built out already, we had a decent base of customers already around just over $1000 Mrr, I believe.

Um And so we could kind of learn from those folks what was resonating well with them and make sure that our positioning and our copy on our homepage was dialed in pretty good.

Um So we at least had a had a sense for what was resonating with people and we could kind of come out strong with that messaging as opposed to using Product hunt as a place to test that messaging.

Um And so I think that set us off on a on a stronger foot.

And so yeah, we we also put a lot of energy into sort of trying to engineer the launch as best we could.

Um a lot of this is beyond your control, still, you never know who's going to be launching on the same day as you, you never know, maybe you'll get shadow banned or something like it.

Sometimes these things happen, but we did everything in our power to make sure that we were putting out a compelling post.

We recruited a hunter, we created heat and shot to hunt it for us with the hope that that would make sure we get, make it to the front page at least and and maybe notify some of his large following that we were going to be live on product hunt and so we just kind of try to engineer the process as much as we could, um, to set ourselves up for success.

And since since that initial launch, we've actually done one other product launch in the last month or so actually, uh, this was for are really, really popular integration that had been probably our most requested feature out of all the other features, which is an iCloud integration.

So we decided, um, you know, we didn't want to do too many launches to kind of wear out our welcome on the platform but figured that, you know, if, if we have some of these really major releases could be a good thing to potentially, you know, stir up some more interest and um, hopefully boost traffic levels a bit to the website and sign ups and and the entire funnel and so we did, we experimented one savvy cal for iCloud.

Um, and we launched that and got, I think around, um, 600 up votes and it drove several 1000 visitors to the website.

It wasn't a huge amount of traffic, but what we noticed was that kind of in the weeks that followed the launch, just overall numbers were lifted up a bit trial counts for Ohio.

And so for the amount of effort that we put into it, I would say it was definitely worth, um, you know, worth it.

Like it paid off as far as we can tell.

And so that's, yeah, that's sort of the basic summary of how our product product launch went initially

Hey brian, this is Corey and I just wanted to echo a couple of thoughts from Derek and add a couple more.

Um, one of the things I think that's really important and underrated for product on is posting right at midnight pacific time.

What I found with prototype is that it's a lot easier to defend a top position than it is to like overtake a top position.

So what we did was we scheduled an email, a couple of tweets and a couple of like slack messages for some communities right at midnight and that we were able to get out of this early bump of 30 to 40 up votes within the 1st 15 minutes of uh, of it going live and product on refreshes every day at midnight pacific time, san Francisco time.

And so more than by like 12:15 a.

m.

Pacific time.

We already had quite a few up votes and the number one position.

And what this does is that now kind of through the middle of the night we're gaining more of those for people who are waking up in over in europe and then Eastern time.

And uh, those are accumulating as quickly as as possible.

And then by the time the rest of the world wakes up and especially the west coast finally wakes up around 67 a.

M.

And they go check proton, we're already, you know, number one, number two of the day and easy to find already at the top and we've already gained a lot of momentum that made a lot easier to uh, to keep that momentum going the rest of the day.

We ended up losing that first position in the last couple of hours in the day.

So we were number one all the way until I think like nine p.

m.

That day.

Uh And so we still reap all the benefits basically, because what happens is that when people come to product organically, we didn't drive them there, but then they see savvy cal at the top of the page and like, oh, what's this interesting? I was in school vote and it's sort of like this interesting dynamic where the top posts end up getting a lot of the natural of votes because they're at the top.

And so it's sort of success begets more success and up votes to get more up votes in that sense.

And uh there was sort of like a late run from another product that very quickly got more votes, but I think that we reaped all the benefits of being number one throughout the rest of the day.

And so that'll be one of my number one tips.

Underestimated, make sure that you're really you're posting early on as soon as midnight strikes.

Um The second one was there is uh so I think we launched maybe on like a Wednesday and then by friday we were in the prototype newsletter and the news that are actually had like a a far bigger effect effect than even posting on a product on the site itself because the newsletter goes out to several 100,000 subscribers.

And um they wrote this amazing subject line.

It was like R.

I.

P.

Callously and uh and a lot of people collect on that.

I mean we had like I was like whoa, whoa.

Like the first day there was this huge bump and then went to the newsletter.

And then all of a sudden we're like where all these sign ups, there's like three times as many sign ups and traffic to the site that there was before.

And then we saw the newsletter.

And um and so that was, it was featured there.

So if you can get featured in the newsletter which they pull from, you know, some of the top posts of the week, that is uh you know, three times or can be three times as effective as just posting um during, during the weekday.

Um and then the third comment I wanted to make is sort of like the residual effect from being on product on.

We had this uh we were in the survey about two months later, I think um where we were asking people how they heard about cervical originally and a huge huge majority.

I mean, I think probably 50% plus, so that they found savvy cal from protestant.

Um and so and then later we added an onboarding question that asked, how do you hear about us? And still, now we see a whole bunch of people coming from protestant.

Um, there's also these residual effects now where protestant has this programmatic content, these pages that they create that are like alternative pages.

So if you go to like cowardly any search calendar alternatives, products will have a page that lists a bunch of top competitors.

And because savvy cal did really well on product on and we have a lot of votes, we are now the top alternative.

Too cowardly, um, which gets seen by a whole bunch of people searching for that within google.

And so again, it's the success begets more success where now people are finding us through product in, but not just from the original post, not just from the newsletter, but also from the site through S.

E.

O.

So few more tidbits for you.

Hopefully that's helpful.

And uh, it was definitely a huge success and more successful than we could have imagined posting a protestant back in january

Thank you both.

Yeah super interesting a lot of little details there that I wasn't aware of.

So um really interesting idea to make sure that you post at midnight pacific time um to catch, you know the beginning of of the of the 24 hour day and the european crowd and to basically defend that first position.

I really like that makes a lot of sense.

Uh And then the other one, derek you mentioned um that you had like pre prepared um responses to potential comments, like how does it differ from X.

Y.

Z.

And you already had those comparison pages? So that's actually my next question, can you unpack a little bit more like what were the major um product enhancements, improvements, features that you've shipped, or marketing pages or things that you needed to get in place in those early months before your product hunt launch.

Um uh You know looking back like what were the key things that like, oh wow, it was a good thing, we really shipped this and that feature or this page before we we launched because it would have been, it would have made it more difficult.

Um anything like that kind of stick out um I don't know if that's the sort of thing, if you want to share your screen, you can do screen plus camera um either way or just talk about it.

Um uh Yeah I would like to get an understanding of um yeah like the like the preparation maybe not necessary for product, but just a good thing that you shipped, these features are these aspects of the product before it went up on on product hunt um Kind of a follow up question to that.

Um Is there anything like technically on product hunt that you that you wanted to get in place? Um sooner rather than later? So I don't know whether it's like subscribing to product hunts paid uh membership plan or I forgot what they call it um You know two or like building up an early access list through product hunts uh subscription system, like anything like that to sort of like get you in a good position for one, once the day comes, you already have that groundwork in place in product on system, anything like that, that you guys sort of worked out? Um Yeah.

All right, well thank you both

so to the question of like how far along was the product? Um I would say we got the product to a place where it felt like it was really working well for people and there was a nice, solid base of customers that were really happy using it.

Um so we had launched initially to the first customers in july and then kind of did a slow launch um to people who had signed up to to the pre launch email list and um kind of kept launching in small batches to those folks as um you know, and when the learning started to slow then open it up to more people until finally got kind of through that list around the beginning of september and then at that point, um you know, publicly launched the product, open the doors that anyone coming to the website could sign up, announced that to the email list again and on twitter.

And so we kind of went from september to january to continue crewing customers refining the product and we did a, another thing we did was went through april Dunford is positioning framework, Her book obviously obviously awesome is a really good resource on kind of a framework, I'm thinking about how to nail down your positioning because we felt like it was important to make sure that the copy on the website kind of aligned with what people we're wanting to see most out of the product and we wanted to kind of take a stand on something, right, like entering this market, it's pretty competitive.

There's a lot of well established competitors and probably a lot of other folks who are in a similar position you're going to have competition, right? So you want to make sure that you are able to stand out and able to differentiate yourself as best as possible.

And so we kind of, we landed on the positioning of sending your scheduling links shouldn't feel weird.

And we were speaking a lot to the power dynamic issues that people experience with other tools.

And that kind of gave us a point of view that we could really, really hone in on.

And I think the more, um, the more pinpointed your point of view is the better you're going to resonate with kind of this, this undifferentiated audience like product hunt, right? Like you have to speak to some, some kind of pain point that a lot of people um have maybe experienced or, or maybe they haven't recognized, I've experienced it yet, but you've strike it struck a nerve for them.

And so I think that really helped out that we could kind of speak to that.

And the fact that we had, you know, it was around 100 customers I think, who really had been using the product for a while and could give an honest review.

Um, you know, when they were posting in the comment thread about, about really loving the product, they could speak to their specific use case.

Uh, and not just be like a friend and a cheerleader who's, you know, there to support, but doesn't actually have real world experience with the product.

And so I think that authenticity helps a ton when, you know, when people are coming looking at this post and trying to figure out why should I care.

Um why should I even click through to look at this, look at this product? And I think that ultimately we've actually been able to use our product from post as I really powerful piece of social proof.

Um we had a link for a long time in our, in our on boarding email that as soon as someone sort of converted into a customer, we said, hey, You know, if if you can take a second, please go show your support on our product on thread and see what, you know, 2100, other people have said about the product.

And so, um you know, you can also kind of think of this as as an asset that grows over time in that way.

Um prior to launching, we actually didn't do any of the like product hunt upcoming product things.

Um I'm not really sure if there's strong evidence that that really helps you succeed more on product hunt.

And ultimately we just kind of built our own email list from our own landing page and sent emails to them and tweeted about it

good stuff so it sounds like your your product was um I wouldn't say like fully mature at the time but you know you spent a good six months working out the kinks in the product um getting the core feature set there and then nailing down some of the positioning stuff so that that makes a lot of sense.

Um So I want to start to like inch closer to uh the product hunt launch but um we're still, I'm guessing sometime out, so that's my next question is like how far in advance of the day that you posted on product hunt? Um Did you start planning like actively working on what is the game plan for this product launch? Like when did you choose the target date? Um I think you mentioned heat and Shah was the one who hunted it.

So like when did you reach out to him and how did that um outreach uh work? Um You know I think that's a that's a thing that that a lot of people are probably unclear about is like how do you um you know find somebody to hunt your product and doesn't have to be someone else or can you hunt your own product? I'm curious if if either of you guys have any thoughts on that or best practices um And then yeah like like how far out did you start to like plan out, like what the communication strategy is going to be when when you're going to send out the emails um what the you know um what does that look like from both of your perspectives? Um You know uh I guess like like derek strategically and Corey.

Like how how involved were you in in the planning and execution of the of the lead up to uh to the product launch.

Thanks guys

so I want to say that we started planning the product launch about a month in advance.

So We launched on Thursday of the 7th January, you know, we probably started to sleep planning around early december, and then, you know, right before christmas were sort of like, okay, we're gonna start putting together the final touches and really start put it into motion and then, you know, the last week of december and the first week of january trying to put everything together.

And so I'm looking right now and uh concerning screen with it's not a lot of interesting things to show here, but like, a really simple page here in linear was sort of like a project management tool, which is hard as I could do a list of, okay, here's the plan, here's who's going to do what links to the google doc where we have sort of like a preview of the private time uh information.

So a couple of useful tools is as a website called preview hunt, which helps you kind of like input to see what you're listening page will look like once it goes live, um and also kind of gives you a list of like, all right, here's all the things we need to do.

We need to have the name and the tagline website description, a couple of topics or categories that this would fit into.

They allow you to list to other relevant links, you can lost a couple other pages on the side or press releases or blog post if you want to a video walkthrough and have a first comment.

Right? So you just start like putting all those things together and then that's also when we started strategizing around, okay, he was going to hunt it, you know, what's the plan for all the things that we need, you know, should we put like a banner on the website, should we change the bile on twitter handles so that uh you know, everyone who comes to Derek's profile to my profile, to the Saudi kill profile would automatically see the product link and uh you know, surface, it's more that way, right? So things like that, you just start to kind of piece together the puzzle pieces.

Um and so we had heat and shaw hunted uh no heat and shaw is also a mentor for tiny seed, which radical is a part of and so sort of use that angle and asked him if he would have to be eaten is a really, really generous guy and, and so he had no problem and part of this whole story too is that a week prior, um actually, maybe even just a couple of days prior, I had launched swipe files on protestant as well.

Um one because I felt like it was times early january, I was having a good place to be able to launch, it was working on some things, but also kind of as a test run for cervical as well.

So I asked heating to hunt, swipe files, I went through that whole process, I kind of worked my plan.

I think life has got to number two of the day as well, although there is a lot less of those, somewhat less competition as well, which was lucky.

But um even if you know, so basically I had that test run I had already seen, okay, here's how you sort of playing for product launch and then we just to forget that and and rents to repeat the process for cervical.

And so you know, there are a lot of top hunters like chris Messina is a great hunter, He integrate hunter, um you know, Ryan hoover Bram, um uh Bram actually has the number one uh uploaded product on product of all time.

There's a list of, you know, you can look up like top product hunters, um uh a link to it here, unzip message, but there's like a this guy created a product leaderboard and so you can see like the top products which you can use to study other successful launches also has a list of top hunters as well and it goes straight to their prototype profile and usually you can find their twitter handle and dM them or you know, go hunt down there, go hunt down their email address also has a list of top makers, right? So you can see sort of um go back on their feet and like see how they launch their products and or even just ask them for advice, right? So you can match them and ask if they have any advice for you.

I found it to be fairly straightforward.

But yeah, I mean the other interesting part of it is that the week before we launched on prototype, I think it was like two weeks before even we launched like a reserve your username campaign.

So for the early access list for Sabako and then for anyone who's following us on twitter who basically said, hey, we're going to be launching sabotage on protestant.

We know that a whole bunch of people are going to be signing up.

So if you wanted to reserve your user name because it's a medical slash your username slash whatever your link name is, It's kind of like some scarcity there, of course I wanted slash Corey Derek has slashed your grammar, things like that.

So if you wanted to reserve yours now you can.

So that urgency and scarcity created a lot of momentum going forward that both the list even further and also built some anticipation for the looming upcoming protestant launch itself.

And then right afterwards, we also plan to do the calendar a buyout campaign, which is also fairly successful and made a couple of things kind of lined up afterwards.

So that once we have people's attention, we could sort of, you know, keep keep milking it a little bit and keep taking advantage of the attention that we had.

But really, I mean the plan day of was like I said before launch at midnight, you know, I kind of get that early push.

We had the newsletter copy all written out.

We had the tweet announcements all written out, linkedin post.

Um, I had a couple of tweets also for Derek on early morning afternoon evening.

I kind of want to live in like status updates, back stories sharing your progress along the day along the way.

And so throughout the day you're sort of um, you know, keeping the most of your, not just kind of letting it go, but you're stoking the fire as it were.

So anyways, to answer your question started loosely planning about a month, a month ahead.

I would say the real planning came about two weeks ahead.

You got heat into to hunt it lined up all the things that you need in order to launch and then you go for it and kind of dot your I's and cross forties day of and anything else that you miss along the way

one more minor detail that will add that I forgot to answer was around hunting, so you absolutely can hunt your own product.

Um the strategy here is that uh definitely not detrimental, there's pretty much only upside if you have so much else hunted because that's someone else's audience and falling that you can tap into.

Now, the sort of, I think outdated and possibly obsolete advice is to get someone who has a lot of followers on protestant because the lobby is sort of notified on protestant when they hunt something.

Um that's true, but I don't think it's nearly as effective anymore as it once was and I think you should think outside of just prototype, find someone who has a large audience whose audience you want to tap into.

Um not just, you know, any one person has a large audience, but someone who has high overlap with your type of product in the industry that you're in, so that is sort of a double whammy, not only are you getting them to hunt it and the other extra credibility and endorsement and social proof, but also they're sharing it on twitter possibly with their email lists as well, if you can get them to do that, which can be a huge bump, you know, he has a few 100,000 followers on twitter, He has a very active on twitter is very um, well, no, well respected, uh he's in the tech and marketing spear, he's a sas founder, so all the right ingredients for what we wanted for Sabako, so again, it's gonna depends, right, if you have like a developer tool, maybe you want to find, um, someone who's sort of like a developer influencer as it were.

If you have, uh, a tool for affiliates or affiliate marketing, you want to find someone really big in the affiliate world and so on and so forth.

But all that to say, you can hunt your own product.

There's definitely nothing wrong with that.

It's just an added benefit.

If you get someone else to hunt it for you, who can further get your exposure and increase the likelihood of you getting to the top of the charts and grabbing that number one product of the day

good stuff, Corey.

Yeah, thank you for sharing all those details, a lot of actionable stuff in there.

Um Really grand and thanks for sharing those links.

That that's really cool.

I haven't seen those before um for you know, finding potential people who could maybe hunt your product and like you said in the follow up makes total sense to kind of find someone with that product or space overlap.

You know, not necessarily the folks who are just huge on product on right? Um so uh I've got like one more like real question and then we'll do like one more final uh fun question for you guys, but this this next one um if one of you could maybe share your screen um it would be great to get some visuals on the actual pieces that you've put in place for product hunt.

So um maybe the product hunt page itself and you can talk through um how you structured it, some of the thinking and strategy behind how, how you uh how you put that together um and maybe some of those emails and tweets, you know, that that led up to it.

Um you know, can you show us what those look like, any any thoughts or or strategy into how you wrote those and the timing of how you sent those um you know, the more execution details that we could see um the better that that's that's the good stuff, at least to me.

Um So yeah, if you could share that stuff and then kind of a follow on to that same question is kind of looking back, um is there anything that you would have done a little bit differently? Um or or things that that you could have optimized a little bit better, like knowing what, you know now about how, how it went, obviously it was it was pretty successful as it was, so, but I'm just curious like if you were to do your very first product hunt launch again for for savvy cal or for or for any next product, um you know, what might you do a little bit differently now? Um All right.

Thanks guys to see it

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

that is awesome.

Thank you for sharing that Derek.

Um I can't get enough of the behind the scenes, you know, Show me your screen, show me the work, show me what it looked like as it was actually coming together.

Um That kind of stuff is so valuable to someone like me and I'm sure many others out there as well uh to wrap this up, you know, I like to do sort of a fun question um for you, Derek or Corey or both of you, if you want to respond to this next one using your phone camera, give us a little tour of your workspace where you working at right now.

Um Derek, it kind of looks like you're in like a cabin or something.

But you know, you know, show us a little bit about like what your work environment is like any any special parts of it that that you think are are cool too.

That helps you out in your, in your workday.

Um Alright, thanks again for doing this and folks, if you are watching this, you can now go ahead and uh and post any questions or responses for Derek, Corey or myself and if it comes in over the next couple of days here, we'll try to respond and you know, maybe it will even make it into the final podcast episode on the shipped podcast, which will be coming out later this year.

Thanks everyone