Product Hunt swiped left on me

Feedbrew.com is basically Tinder for startups. I thought it was cool at least.

It’s late in the evening on Friday, March 29th. Just a few short hours before my 3rd product of the year goes live on Product Hunt and I’m fired up.

Still buzzing from a #1 Product of the Day a month earlier with Botroast.io, I was poised for another successful launch.

My tweet earlier in the day was getting solid traction and a lot of positive sentiment from the indie hacker community.

Things were shaping up.

Launch day

It’s 12:17am and I finally close my laptop. I just pushed up some last minute bug fixes and finishing touches.

I’ll be asleep before the launch goes live at 3am PST, but I’ll be waking up with a smile because I’ll be in that top spot.

6am rolls around and my 3 month old daughter is stirring. She’s must be able to sense it too. Feedbrew is on it’s way to the moon.

I open up the Product Hunt app on my phone.

Holy shit my phone is bright. Let me turn the brightness down a bit.

The page finally loads and Feedbrew is no where to be found.

What???

Oh, right.

In the early hours of launch day the votes are all hidden and the products are shuffled so that they all have a fair shake at getting some organic traction.

Cool. So where’s Feedbrew?

Turns out that not every launch gets “featured”, meaning you’ll have no chance of getting Product of the Day, any badges, and any traffic that you might’ve gotten had you been featured was pretty much out the window.

Good luck on the “All” tab chump.

All my Easter eggs in the Product Hunt basket

This Easter weekend launch could be summed up in 1 word.

Lackluster.

37 upvotes is a far cry from the #1 POTD launch I had just one month earlier.

This was flat out embarrassing.

But it was my fault.

I put all my eggs in one basket.

No backup plan. No plan B. Nothing.

Stats

Here are some stats from when I first shared Feedbrew to Twitter on 3/29/24 ‘til today on 4/29/24.

App Stats

• 79 user registrations

• 52 products posted

• 5,397 swipes

  • 2,022 right swipes (likes)

  • 3,375 left swipes (dislikes)

• 417 product clickthroughs

• 30 ad clickthroughs

• 19 pieces of feedback left on products

Revenue

• 1 customer for $5 🥲

Twitter launch thread (here)

• 23.5k views

• 152 likes

• 118 bookmarks

• 42 comments

• 16 retweets

Product Hunt launch (here)

• 37 upvotes

• 29 comments

Google Analytics

• 1.2k users

• 1.1k uniques

Monetization

I built in two ways to monetize Feedbrew.

1.) A credit-based system that allows makers to ask specific feedback about their product, as opposed to a generic feedback form. Credits range from $5 to $19.

2.) Ad slots for $249.

Didn’t sell any ad slots, but I used that to promote my agency.

Experiments

After the Product Hunt flop, I shared Feedbrew to Hacker News.

Another flop.

Then I had the idea of baking in a way to claim products on Feedbrew so that I could curate new products myself, and then reach out to the makers and let them know.

I did this for a small number of people with a very limited response rate. Something like 1 out 10 people had responded.

I specifically went after products that were snubbed on the Product Hunt “featured” tab, much like Feedbrew.

I figured that would be a good way to break the ice.

Overall, it’s been too small of a sample size to glean any meaningful insights from, but I’ll keep chugging trying things out.

Distribution > > >

For someone who is a builder at heart, I love the product side of things.

I love building eye-catching, memorable, and delightful digital experiences.

I’ve never put much effort into the other side of things — the distribution side.

The sales, the marketing, the partnerships, etc.

So it’s time to experiment some more with that, but admittedly, this challenge of building 12 products in 12 months doesn’t lend itself well to “distribution”.

So far, it’s been a whirlwind of juggling family life with 2 small kids, being back at my 9-5, and cobbling together my projects with any time that I have left over.

It’s time to rework things a bit and set myself up for success.

I’m thinking I will spend less of the month building, and more of the month focusing on distribution.

As I write this, it’s already towards the end of April so my April project will likely suffer from lack of distribution, but I'll look towards May to try something new.

Stay tuned for more — the debrief of my April project will be coming real soon!