What worked and what didn't work on UneeBee launch

[ceolinwill]

I have only 200 followers on social media. Having 12,000 unique users visiting UneeBee's website over the past two days was a surprise to me. I'd like to share what worked and what didn't work. Hopefully, some of this will be helpful to other people launching products in the future.

What worked

Hacker News

Hacker News is the main responsible for the launch success. My post there got 400+ upvotes, 100+ comments and made to the front page, staying there the whole day on Saturday.

Most posts I see on the Show HN section are just a link to the landing page. I want to make it more personal. I also wrote a short text explaining what I was building and why I was building it. Plus, I asked for honest feedback and the community helped a lot.

I posted it on Saturday around 1 am PST. I think this helped a little bit. Lots of people were online checking out the OpenAI drama and we didn't have many posts because it was a Friday night after all. I think all that helped to catch people's attention.

Reddit

I posted on three communities: OpenSource, SideProject and ProductHunters.

The OpenSource community had the best result by far: 10.9k views, 64 upvotes, 20 comments, 8 shares and the discussion there was so good it actually changed my mind about UneeBee's license, which is now AGPL.

The SideProject folks were also nice. I got 2.6k views there, 11 upvotes, 8 comments, and 16 shares. However, my post on the ProductHunters subreddit didn't work. It got only 75 views and 2 upvotes.

On the OpenSource subreddit, I focused more on why I'm building this project. On the SideProject one, I used the same post I published on Hacker News. But, on Product Hunters, I only shared a link to the Product Hunt page because that's what the rules allow there. Clearly telling a story is more impactful than just sharing a link.

What didn't work

Product Hunt

I tried to follow Peer Richelsen's Product Hunt guide to the best of my abilities but it didn't work. Jokes aside, I only got 14 upvotes on Product Hunt and it didn't get featured on the home page. It was a total failure.

I followed their recommendation and launched it one minute past midnight on Pacific Time. I linked to the Product Hunt page on all my communications (Hacker News, Reddit, social media). No luck.

Maybe I did something wrong but I got the feeling Product Hunt only works if you have a good social media presence, which isn't my case. I'll try again in the future but I'll probably won't spend much time on it.

Social media

I posted on X, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Both on my personal profile and on Zoonk's. I got some minor engagement on X and LinkedIn but everything else flopped.

As I said, I don't have a big social media presence. So, tbh, I wasn't expecting great results there. My hope was that a big account would eventually like UneeBee after seeing it somewhere else and repost it, driving engagement up but that didn't help.

I know I need to improve my social media presence but, tbh, right now I prefer to focus most of my energy on making UneeBee better.

Indie Hackers

I had some success with Indie Hackers in the past but it didn't work this time. My post got only 21 views, no comments nor likes. I used the same post that worked on Hacker News.

I think, overall, Indie Hackers has potential if you manage to be active on the community, which (ironically) is hard when you're an indie hacker and have limited time.

Conclusions

Hacker News worked much better than I expected but I feel it was a little bit of luck. I don't if it's going to work in the future again. Reddit also seems a good place to be, especially to get some feedback on what you're doing. I'll try to be more active there.

Product Hunt doesn't feel very useful unless you have a big social media presence. Increasing social media presence requires a lot of work, though. I'm not sure how to do it while keep improving the product, which is my main priority right now.