#1 on Product Hunt thanks to newsletters and good timing

Hey Indie Hackers

In my day job, I am a freelance developer working for Meta/Facebook as the Docusaurus maintainer.

It's a quite flexible opportunity (3d/week) and allows me to work on my indie React newsletter (thisweekinreact.com) on the side (2d/week)

We launched v2.0 on Monday on:

• Our blog
• Twitter
• Hacker News
• Product Hunt

It was a big launch for us considering the v2 was being in alpha/beta for... 4 years!

I optimized the launch to perform on Product Hunt, and we got the 1st spot!
Product of the day with 900+ upvotes! (which looks like a great score in August)

Docusaurus 2.0 pitch

If you build a product, make sure to try Docusaurus for your documentation! 👌

You can start very start simple: just write Markdown files. Then it scales with your usage and really permits your docs to respect your product's branding and have a customized design.

Think of it like the Pareto principle: get great results for a minimal effort. IMHO it is perfect for Indie Hackers :)

Some of our best sites:

• React-Native
• Figma
• Ionic
• Supabase
• Tauri
• Electron
• Prettier
• StackBlitz
• Hasura
• Algolia
• Jest
• Redis

Some Indie Hackers here already use it! 😏

• Plausible Analytics
• Gladys Assistant
• SigNoz

Monday: the perfect date

Why did I choose Monday to launch?

I really wanted Docusaurus to be the product of the day on Product Hunt. I believe it's an awesome doc tool and it's already quite popular in the frontend/React ecosystem but it's not (yet) widely known among product builders from Product Hunt or Indie Hackers/

I choose Monday because I got a commitment from large tech newsletters to cover our launch, and their publication time was a good fit to drive traffic in a very short time to the blog post. And the blog post was driving traffic to Product Hunt (see our blog post)

As you know, for a Product Hunt successful launch you need to collect as much upvotes/comments as possible during a 24h time frame, starting 00:01 PST

• Sidebar.io (40k subs, sent at ~05:00 PST) would cover the launch in its 5 daily links
• Bytes.dev (100k subs, send at ~11:00 PST) would cover the launch as one of the 2 main stories: bytes.dev/archives/111

I also have my own 10k newsletter (ThisWeekInReact.com) that I would also send at the ideal time: 00:01 PST is the morning in Europe where I have many very engaged subscribers

I was hoping to be featured in TLDR.tech on Monday (300k subs), but it didn't happen as the founder Dan only included us on Tuesday (still awesome 🙌).

I knew that other newsletters would be interested to cover the story, but they were either smaller (React Status, Wednesday, 55k subs), or the audience would be a bit too diverse (JavaScript Weekly, 300k, Friday) and the link wouldn't make the headline. With Bytes + Sidebar both on the same day, it looked really better to launch on Monday.

Of course, I also prepared a Twitter thread (with FeedHive, great indie product!) which also brought a lot of traffic to the blog post + Product Hunt

The Hacker News launch was a flop. After a bad start, I had to link directly to the HN post, and we did reach the front page (apparently direct upvotes still work? 🤔) for a few hours but the mod edited my longer title to just "Docusaurus 2.0" and then nobody cared anymore. Still drove a bit of traffic but I expected more.

Results

In terms of Google Analytics, we can clearly see peaks of traffic that seem related to the publication of large newsletters :)

Some of this traffic would clearly lead to upvotes on Product Hunt, which in turn helped us become the product of the day!

Note: newsletters are not only creating some traffic peaks, but not all subscribers would open the email as soon as they receive it, so it also contributes to good traffic distributed over time!

Considering we launched everything at once, it's hard to know exactly which action lead to which traffic peak so this is only a guess.

Conclusion

I believe a good newsletter timing really helped us become the product of the day, and I would definitively recommend you to try the same strategy:

• study the landscape of existing newsletters in your field, be exhaustive
• contact their owners to see if they are willing to cover your launch
• make the decision easy for them: pitch them a good angle that matches their audience, give them exclusive material, and let them be the first to cover your big news

What's next? In the following days, I continued to reach out to all relevant newsletter authors I know. We still got included in many other newsletters that I contacted, and we continue to receive traffic (React Status, Frontend Focus...).

Now I hope that our launch will also be featured in the largest tech newsletters as well: GitHub, StackOverflow, freeCodeCamp, Smashing Magazine... I pitched them all, and it looks like it could happen, we'll see soon 😉

Let me know if you have any question!

Have a great day indies 👋