A Guide to Launching on Discord

Last week I launched my product 1000 Pound Club on Discord. It was very different from every other launch platform I've tried and had surprisingly good and unique results.

Discord got me 20–30 registered users.

This increased my user base by 50%.

I'm surprised I haven't seen more people talking about launching on Discord! Since it's been so effective for me, I decided to share more about it with this post.

What makes Discord different

Most other launch platforms are kind of "post and forget" where you:

1. Make a post on a platform
2. Hope that the post does well
3. Respond to comments

This is pretty low-effort (except Product Hunt), but it leaves a lot up to chance. How do you know if your post will do well? What if no one ever comments on the post?

These platforms like Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Reddit all have pretty glorified results. We often see people explode off of these platforms, so we think they're great. However, the vast majority of people don't get any traction. These methods are often either a great success or a great failure.

All of these platforms are a forum system, while Discord is a chat system.

Discord is made up of a lot of different chats. Think of it as a giant group chat with a bunch of strangers all interested in the same topic. If you're a product developer, this sounds like a gold mine. You can get a lot of quick feedback from a targeted group of people.

While even the biggest forum platforms get several posts an hour, Discord chats have several messages a minute, making it a very fast-paced environment for a product launch.

This can be a difficult environment for the unfamiliar, but very effective if done right.

Finding the right Discord server

Similar to subreddits, Discord is split up into many servers. These servers are created by any user and are a community of people, often under one topic.

While Reddit may only have 1 "powerlifting" subreddit, for example, Discord may have 20 of them, all with a different set of people. This is a great opportunity to try different methods on different subsets of people.

There's a website called Disboard where you can search for a topic and it'll give you many Discord servers under that topic.

I searched for the topic "powerlifting" and joined 10 of the biggest and most active Discord servers that focus on powerlifting.

How to promote your product

Just like any other platform, Discord users do not like ads (the platform itself has no ads) and most servers do not allow promoting products. Then how do we promote our products? By fitting them into natural conversation.

Discord chats are just like real life. If you were at a powerlifting convention and you walked up to someone saying, "Hey can you check out my product?", they would probably just walk away from you. It's the same thing here.

How I approached this was telling people I was into powerlifting, but I never really talked to other people about it, I just lift, so I wanted to join a powerlifting community. This usually made them very welcoming to me.

At some point I mentioned that I was building a powerlifting app, so it was really useful talking to people to get more ideas for the app.

When I mentioned this, one person literally asked me to link my product so he can check it out. Easy.

Since these are just conversations, not everyone will be as open. There was one chat where I kept hinting at my product hoping the person would ask about it. Since I kept mentioning it, I was being a little overaggressive with it. I got impatient and just linked my site. And he called me out for self-promoting. It was a pretty funny chat though!

One server was unbelievably supportive and told me to promote it in one of their public channels where normally only admins can post. Then they @'ed all of the powerlifters in the channel. I was blown away by this. It got me a lot of users. They mentioned their powerlifters were looking for a platform similar to this. They were looking for more of a "leaderboard" than my platform, so I added that to my feature request list.

Conclusion

I hope this gives you a good sense of what it's like launching on Discord.

Discord can be more effort and more time consuming than other platforms, but it's a great way to guarantee some eyes on your platform, learn about your users, and test your product market fit.

It very much feels like going to a convention, talking to strangers who are interested in your niche, then subtly pushing your product.

While these kinds of conventions are rare, you can get the same or better results any time on Discord.

In the future, I plan to use Discord not just for launches, but also product research. Discord seems very natural for product research, but also building that early connection can get you your first users before your product even exists.

Have you launched on Discord before? Does Discord sound like a good place to launch?

For funny Discord stories and day-to-day updates on my progress, check out my Twitter:

https://twitter.com/alexanderqchen