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building an indie business in the center a venture capital I'm Alex Edmonds and this is the building an indie business podcast okay I'm gonna be talking about the product hunt launch for the podcast that I did but first I want to say hello to all my listeners in France and then I want to thank the jar Sergio David Pradeep James Dean neo and the rest of open podcasts and the maker log community for supporting me on product hunt and with the launch for this episode I'm there talking up the two goals that I had for the product on launch how I prepared a little more about the preparation how to have a successful launch in my opinion the benefits of product on the problems that product on has now what now what am I going to do that I had launched on product time before and after so before and after the product time launch a little bit of stats the results of the product Taunton launch someone kind of gave me some feedback so I'm going to be talking about that for a bit and then I'm going to review the experience okay so the two goals that I had for the product top launch are to get people to subscribe and to get email subscribers okay how I prepared the first thing I did is I created a gif of the two logos that I have so I have a blue logo just with the words building an indie business I have a red logo of that and then I have two logos that Fedora created for me so his version of the podcast logo with my face and he gave me a red one and I made a blue one out of that so I created the gif because um why did I create okay I created the gift sorry because on product hunt when you're seeing all the listings of the products it'll show all the changing pictures and it'll catch people's attention they actually recommend doing this and so I thought mine was a little fast but I think it caught more attention I created a landing page I'll be going into that more I researched when to post so you're supposed to post at midnight Pacific Standard Time which is actually my timezone so it was a little easy and I did it on Sunday going into Monday so I had the entire Monday to promote my launch I had to stay up late because I usually I go to sleep at 10 it's 11 no I go to sleep at 10 and so I had to stay up till midnight to post the launch or to post it on product time I wrote coffee I made sure to mention open podcast a bunch in the copy in the actual product I'm listing I created a new trailer I'll go into that a little bit more and I bought a domain ba I be - podcast calm okay so I want to talk about the landing page basically I didn't put that much effort into it I took supreme rum ham dot design I took that home page and I just wrote everything out that I had for my stuff and then I added some open podcast stuff or not know some some podcast stuff stuff about the podcast so specifically what I did is I made it like a preview of the type of content that you would hear on the podcast so I broke it down into three different types of episodes so the first episode would be about podcasting like how to interview someone how to market your podcast things like that so that was the first chunk and I had a preview of the episode how to know I had an embedding of the episode of how to interview someone and then I had a little copy about podcasting and like what kind of episodes I'm doing about podcasting okay the next embed example is I had about community building so yeah I talked about how I'm using the podcast to grow open podcasts and then I had how to grow community as the example and finally I had I talked about web development and the example I used was learning says because I don't really talk about web development anymore because as you know I use discourse for my forum and so that didn't take a lot of effort and then the blog I used ghost so that didn't take a lot of effort so I don't really talk about web development but I will in the future when I build a custom form okay so the next thing I did was I put a link to the most popular podcast players so that people can easily just subscribe to the podcast I had Apple Spotify Google and the RSS feed and then the final thing I had no not the the final thing I had on the front page was a link to the mailing list at the bottom of all the examples and then I also added and about the host page and then I just talked about me for a bit and then I had a link to open podcast because everything I do is about promoting open podcasts so that's why I made sure to mention open podcast a bunch okay then I created the new trailer for the podcast and I specifically only had it on YouTube and the trailer was just basically an audio version of the landing page so I just talked about podcasting I read the copy community building I read the copy of development I read the copy and that was about it it was about 50 seconds something like that okay how to have a successful launch the Alex Edmonds version okay so you want to launch it at 12:00 a.m. PST and the reason you want to do this is because you have the max amount of time to promote the launch so you have 24 hours and on product on the way it works is that it'll show the most popular things that have been launched on the on the site that day and so you have the max amount of time to potentially be on that top and then tomorrow it's still there but it's at the bottom after today's stuff and so I'm still getting up boats right now but it's not as impactful as yesterday okay so after you have posted on product on the next thing you want to do is you want to tweet it and you want to be careful with what you say in your tweet because if you if you solicit up votes then product time will punish you make you weaker and the algorithm or might just take off your product on launch and so what you want to do is you want to say hey I my product is listed on product on in that way it's like code people know to go upload it so I tweeted about it I promoted it in the community summon I promoted it in maker log and open podcast that's why a lot of open podcasts and maker log they all voted my product and they commented everyone I mentioned in the beginning they commented and I really appreciate that thank you the next thing I did was I made it in a milestone on indie hackers in my opinion in indie ackers is only really good for community and their milestones because there's not a lot of any actor interaction on indie hackers so you have to use some milestones finally not finally yeah finally I promoted the launch on reddit I promoted it on our slash side projects which is how I promote a podcast so those people are familiar with me and I did the same thing I just said hey I'll watch my podcast on product hunt here it is check it out ok ok so now we're gonna talk about the benefits of product time you can get potentially a lot of traffic in a short amount of time 24 hours I'm going to talk about the traffic I got later ok next a benefit of product time is that it's free you don't have to pay anything a benefit for me for product time in terms of podcasting is that product time is sort of like the people on there the audience the product audience they're sort of my target market but not really but some people might come join open podcast after hearing my podcast or singing my launch sorry about that okay um problems you're potentially gonna have high turnover so and if you launch a community on product hunt you're gonna get a lot of signups but then a lot of people that don't come back the next day it's part of the the process okay the traffic isn't organic you need to promote your listing and then that promotion that you've done and the people that come in because you've promoted it will help you get to the top and then more people will see it if you just list your product I'm listing and just don't do any promotion no one will see it when I did a product I launched for alleged for BTC just to check it out I only got five outputs but this time I had the community I listed it everywhere I had I prepared a lot and then I it wrote it this time I had a lot of thoughts okay a lot of preparation I did the new trailer I did the audio I I created a lead magnet also but that's a little different a lot of things I had to create new logos because the size of my logos weren't appropriate I didn't fit well with product hunt so I had to create new logos a lot of preparation I'll talk about this later staying up late so I had to stay up late and I'm not used to that I specifically streamed the launch of the pot or the product on launch I stayed up for an hour extra and what happened was I streamed it just to keep me awake I forgot to mention that and how to have a successful much you should stream it so that way people are watching you and as soon as you watch on Protestant they'll know and they'll upload it you can send it to them even in the comments okay so staying up late another problem that I had was deciding what links to add to the listing so you can add multiple links and I have 50 different links from Davie different from every different player so I was having trouble figuring out what links to put and so that's why at the very top of the landing page I had the most popular links but also that's kind of I want people to subscribe right away so by having the landing page they can't subscribe right away and I didn't want to have too many links because I would overwhelm people and prevent people from subscribing so I had the Apple link which was the most popular but the problem with the Apple link is that that excludes people from Google people from subscribing to the podcast I thought about putting the RSS feed but the RSS feed is a little weird because if you click on the RSS feed it just brings you to the actual RSS feed and some people might not know you have to copy and paste it so yeah that was one of my big problems another problem I had was people would only upvote and they wouldn't actually check out my link and like I said my goal was to get people to subscribe and sign up for an email my email list for the podcast and by only uploading you're not subscribing to anything so yeah now what not what am I gonna do since I did the product top launch I'm gonna use everything I created to list the podcasts on similar websites so I think beta page dot co is a similar website so I'm going to list the trailer the different images the gif if they let me okay so now before the product tonton launch the sunday even like so minutes before I had five hundred five thousand two hundred twenty ninety two downloads and three email subscribers and the results for the podcast I got zero email subscribers and 110 downloads but the problem with that downloads is it's not an accurate measure because on Monday so the second I download the second I listed the podcasts on product on I had a new episode to come out so people downloaded the new episode okay so the results may have been pumped up I think I already said that so the results of the product launch from the product on site I think I finished 13 out of 20 in between 12 and 13 so there's the top 10 products and if you clicked more you would see my product so I think I did decent especially for someone who doesn't really use product on yeah and then as of right now I have 139 uploads two people have voted it since last night which is good continuing content or continuing traffic nothing to complain about that I have 18 comments I'm going to address one comment because that was really funny I got so people can review and it's basically an upvote downvote four out of five recommended my podcast so 4 out of 5 dentist recommend the building an indie business podcast nothing wrong with that okay so the landing page I checked on full story the landing page got 128 views I haven't gone through all the views I don't know how many people clicked okay okay so this guy this morning actually he said I like the podcast and that's why I voted him but this guy has less energy than a priest at a funeral and I want to address this comment first of all I thought it was really funny because it's true yeah sorry needed water but um first of all he clearly first of all the way I commented it was I don't know enough about priest or spawn to that which is true even though I went to Catholic school for seven years okay he clearly didn't hear the episode the results of dogs and web development when i yealed viral um after that episode i was asked not to yell so that kind of I've had that mindset but for someone me who listens to so much content from comedians I should be able to figure out how to make the podcast funny without having to yell which is true also I have been discussing since before I started a podcast I remember having a conversation in March the month I launched the podcast about how to make it more funny while giving people value out of the podcast let me see what else do I have it's difficult to focus on your energy levels and making the podcast or and the content at the same time so right now I'm in front of my notes the podcast recording software and I'm focused on the PAS the notes I'm not though it's difficult to focus on like my energy when I'm trying to figure out what to say you know what I mean also on the topic of priests Oh priests say the same things over and over again so they have the ability to focus on their energy levels they don't have to focus on the content like I said I've been making working on making the podcast funny since I started most of my current jokes are very deadpan I'm not going to point them out to you I'm not going to say get it get it after I make a joke so one joke that I made which I can think of that as when I was talking about the forum I said I thought down both side vote that was a joke the new intro is a joke I'm making fun of like a regular newscasts or different podcasters where they try to make it all professional and talk like this as their podcast and I laugh after - so you know I'm laughing at the joke that's why I laugh every time ok and finally I used to tell random jokes at the end of the podcast I used to wait five seconds looking at the software counting one two three four five and then I would just tell some random old joke that everyone knows like why did the chicken cross the road or two guys walk into a bar very common jokes so yeah that I think I've addressed that comment enough that was like two to three minutes of just that okay and finally review of the experience on product hunt um I don't think it was worth it I mean it wasn't worth all the effort because I had to make the gif I had to resize my my logos had a read all that copy lots of work for a little reward because I only got a hundred and ten downloads I'm not sure how many subscribers I don't think a lot because a well-written article on our / podcasting would have given me more traffic yeah lots of clicks the goal with subscribers let's see what else I think it's really funny that people say oh if I have a successful launch I'll be set that's not true it's a lot of little things that you do to become set set or be successful and I that kind of reminds me of comedians and how some would treat that Tonight Show the same way if I go on The Tonight Show and I have a good set I'll be good as a comedian people come listen to me and that's not true what I do it again on what I launched on product again yes and the only reason why is because I have all the assets prepared already and it's free it's free traffic I don't I don't really pay attention when people say anymore that guy was right I got a lot a lot of praise yeah I would do it again just because I have the assets and it's free traffic so yeah that's the episode thank you for listening haven't have a nice day bye