It's been a week since the launch (2nd of the day). Here are some tips for you!

Hey everyone! Like the title says, it's been exactly a week today since we launched Touring here on Product Hunt, and the results have been really impressive. A few numbers: - more than 3000 unique visitors to the website (from more than 100 countries) - featured in 18 different newsletters around the globe - more than 600 signups to become early adopters - 800 upvotes and more than 150 comments on PH This is crazy, but I'm not here to brag or anything, I just wanted to let others know how useful a launch on Product Hunt can be, and how much exposure it can give you if you plan and arrange for it! Lots of people contacted me on X and Linkedin to ask how to get these good results, so I decided to try and create a useful discussion here! Disclaimer: I am no expert, and this was my first launch, so if I managed, you can too! And now, for the useful part of the discussion. During this week, we kept bumping into things where we thought "Ahhh, damn it. We should have done this before!", so I want to share with you a few things that I wrote down in my notes (most are about questions we should have included in the survey people had to fill in to become early adopters): - We should have asked which social networks people used and ask for their handle, so we would know how to reach them other than their email - We should have asked where they learned about Touring: attribution is always useful - We should have looked better at the limits of the free plans of the tools we were using: we used Mailchimp to collect emails, and we did not even think we would ever get above the 500 limit of the free tier. Well, we did, and we did it quite fast, so we were super happy to learn that mailchimp still collected emails but did not show them to us until we paid. If they didn't, we would have lost several early adopters. - We should have connected on LinkedIn with people we deemed possibly interested in Touring a few weeks before the launch, so that they would get updates when posting about the launch and the following updates. We only realized this a few days before the launch, so we did not maximize this effect. - We realized - almost at the end of the launch - that we would have loved to know how much people would pay for a day pass of Touring. Results? By adding it at the end of the survey we only got 100 datapoints instead of 600+, a big difference - statistically speaking. - We should have asked which city people lived in: this would be crucial to select the first early adopters, but we lost this information: tough luck, a learning lesson! A few other things that helped with the launch (these ones we did :D) - track EVERYTHING: we used mixpanel and mouseflow to track everything useful regarding the interactions of visitors with the website: 70% of the early adopters played around with our online simulator! This is a good nice pat on the shoulder for us, made us happy! - engage A LOT with the community the weeks before the launch: I have been active every day for more than a month here on PH, always trying to bring some value in the discussions and never being purely transactional: the "I upvote you if you upvote me" only gets you a nice number on the launch page but nothing more than that, I believe. - Search for channel to post about your launch: there are several slack groups, linkedin groups, facebook groups, subreddits etc etc. Just do a few searches and you'll easily find them. Most of them need approval to let you in, so do it in advance! - Write to people! People in these groups are usually interested in new products. Don't insist, but just let them know about your product and ask them to check it out if they are interested. You'll be surprised by how many will actually do it and give you feedback! Reach out for any question, I'd love to help you out the best I can! You can follow me on X (Twitter). Let me know if I forgot something, let's create a useful launch tips&tricks discussion for everyone! Cheers, Gabs