Avoid "Big launches"

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I recently launched an Android version of my app, Happyfeed (a gratitude journal) on PH. I signed up for Ship Pro and got about 42 subscriptions pre-launch all from my website traffic.

Anyway, come launch day, I set up all the things - email blast, tweets, product images, etc. but ended up in the last place for the day (ouch). I've seen other, very similar products, do much better with their launches.

In the end, it doesn't really matter, because the Android app has been growing steadily and actually boosting growth in my original iOS app. It sucked to have such a lame launch day, and I think a soft launch would've led to less frustration.

My thoughts now? You really need a full-time person focused on your launch if you want to go big. As a solo/technical founder, I didn't take the time to focus on the launch, so it turned into more of a distraction. I didn't have the brain space between bug fixes and last-minute features to really think about a serious launch plan. (Not just on PH, but reaching out to press and all that jazz.) Waiting another month or two would've been a hell of a lot smarter.

As a developer, big launches cause a lot of unnecessary stress. Worried about whether the roll out will work, worried about if the rollback plan will work, worried about being off ill with the cold on launch day, so much worry.

These days I'm trying more of a release-small-and-release-often approach. I'm trying to break down releases into 2 week deliverables and if it's bigger than 2 weeks then it needs simplified / broken down again. Still early days with this but seems to be doing wonders for my motivation.

Just treat every one of your "Big Launches" as a "soft launch" (read "experiment"), then learn from it and repeat :)

This is part of why I think we'll be doing our ProductHunt launch in August, despite doing our "official launch" in June (and even though we've been publicly available since early February)

What would you do instead?

The same mistake I did. From the first day, I hunted my product on Product Hunt. It has been more than a week now, and it has only a total of...3 upvotes, from which one is mine...

Next time I launch something, I'll avoid putting it on Product Hunt if it's not that "original" or doesn't make you go "aha!".

I agree. In fact, I think you never really "launch". Or you are launching every day, to be more precise.

It might be a good idea to coordinate things like posting on ProductHunt, PR, some email outreach.... You will finish that, maybe see a spike in traffic, maybe not. Usually it will turn out that the stress was totally unnecessary.

Then what? This is the real "launch", how you talk to people every day and market your product, at least for smaller companies. It is not a good use of time to think like you're already Google or Amazon and you are making this big serious announcement to all the major online publications etc... Building a real audience every day will get you more users in the long run.