How NOT to launch your new product

As an indie maker at some point you face the last phase of your product development - the launch. Here’s how not to launch your product… learned the hard way 😐

I Need Brains it was my first product… which I’ve screwed so much 🤦‍♂️

I wanted to create something. Literally SOMETHING. It didn’t need to earn money. It could just bring some followers on my Twitter. That’s all.

When the idea came, I just grabbed the laptop and I started coding backend in Node.js and after that frontend in React.

The app solved my problem. I don’t know who should I follow on Twitter to get the meat. I don’t want to read about politics. Only engineering and indie stuff.

Do not launch when your competitor launched his/her product a couple of days ago 🤦‍♂️

Couple of days before my launch Follow Friday appeared on PH. Almost the same idea. Better design. Quicker launch. He gained hundreds of upvotes and I got 4 😐

Do not forget about marketing stuff 💩

I was so angry that I wanted to launch quickly and I did. I’d just made two screenshots, written some short description and that’s all. Did the same thing for Hackernews and for Wykop (Polish Reddit).

Do not overegineer your product 🤖

I wanted to do simple app that will list Twitter profiles. I’m full stack developer, so I thought that I should use my technologies to do it quickly. Nope. That’s not how you do the MVP as an indie maker. Use the No Code tools. Seriously. For example, do you need an API that will serve some data? Use Google Sheets with Sheety or Sheet2Site to make even a full app. Do you want to do simple one page app? Use Carrd.

Here are other things you can check before launch.

Cheers. Hope your launch will be successful 🚀