Ryan Hoover

Ship by Product Hunt - A toolkit for makers to ship awesome products β›΅

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Ship is a toolkit for makers to build awesome products. Use Ship to generate demand, build an email list, and communicate with your audience, and ship product.

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Ryan Hoover
For the past several weeks we've been beta testing a new suite of tools to help makers and startups build awesome products. We call it Ship. Ship is useful for anyone building a product: pre-launch, at launch, and post-launch. After all, launching is not a one-time thing and building an engaged community is πŸ”‘. During our beta period, awesome folks including Eric Ries, Casey Neistat, and larger companies like Shopify, used Ship to announce their upcoming product launches, collect emails from interested subscribers, and gather feedback from their audience. We're opening access on a first-come, first-serve basis, so reserve your place in line now. If you'd like to skip the waitlist, sign up for one of the Pro plans and unlock additional super powers, including: ✏️ Surveys and Polls* πŸ‘¨β€πŸ‘©β€πŸ‘§β€πŸ‘¦ Group Messaging* πŸ—“ Scheduled Product Launches* πŸ” A/B Testing* πŸ“ˆ Reports and Analytics* 🌐 Custom Domain* πŸ“£ Product Promotion 🎣 Webhooks *These features are shipping soon! Questions/feedback!? We'd love to hear it. 😸 EDIT: We decided to offer 20% off our Pro plans for the next few days using this link.
Adam Leidhecker
@rrhoover πŸ”₯🀘 well done team!
Omar Uddin
@rrhoover good stuff - paid plans start off a bit steep but look forward to trying it out.
foo
@rrhoover Awesome :) We already talked about this, but I think indeed that PH would gain allowing to follow a product in all the steps of its life, not just at launch. Did you consider plugging prelaunch to Betalist? It sounds like an obvious/useful addition.
Frank Denbow
@rrhoover Looks cool but what does "Product Promotion" mean exactly?
Ryan Hoover
@frank_denbow those using the Pro plans will get additional visibility on our index of upcoming product launches and the homepage of Product Hunt.
Hiten Shah
What started as an MVP called Upcoming has turned into Ship! Bravo Product Hunt team. This is going to be super useful to all of us releasing new products and improving existing ones. πŸ™πŸ½πŸš€πŸ€—
Ryan Hoover
@hnshah πŸ™πŸΌπŸ™πŸΌπŸ™πŸΌ For everyone else, Hiten's been one of our best supporters over the past few months of beta testing. Thanks for all the advice and help!
Ben Tossell
@hnshah @rrhoover Hiten also does a stellar job of building in public... Adding a 'product log' could be a good addition to the offering.
Kunal Bhatia

There was a void left by people who wanted to reach the Product Hunt community but weren't ready to launch. You had to put a lot of effort into creating a webpage just to do a 'Pre-launch' hunt. That's all simplified now.

Pros:

You can put very little effort into building a landing page and getting beta customers, letting you focus on shipping your product!

Cons:

Nothing really! There's still a free version for everyone bootstrapping!

Andrew Falchook
Couldn't be more excited to start using Ship for upcoming projects. Sites like https://feathrd.co/ have really implemented it beautifully.
Nick Abouzeid
@falchook Couldn't agree more! cc @ambonium
Harry Raymond
@falchook beautiful implementation.
Harry Raymond
@falchook Only downer though is the powered by product hunt widget doesn't work on mobile.
Amrith
@falchook @harryraymond thanks Harry, glad you like it :)
Nick Abouzeid
@falchook @harryraymond Working on this! On our list of bugs to quash πŸ™
Kireeti Varma
And thus, Product Hunt gets into business. :)
Jeremiah Smith

We've been using our upcoming page for the last couple of weeks and have collected over 1,000 emails already 😊

Saves days if not weeks by giving you tools to launch and iterate out of the box.

Welcome to the future πŸš€

Pros:

The fastest way to collect emails while your build

Cons:

Nope, beats WordPress landing pages any day

Primer
Glad to see that "upcoming" has evolved into a "Ship". I have to say I'm put off somewhat by the monthly pricing. It's really quite high. Observation: there is a lack of clarity around "product promotion" and I've already seen others on here asking about it. Clearly this will be the primary driver of anyone using the service. Is there a reason it has been left somewhat vague in what it means? Also does this mean the PH homepage will become flooded with products that have paid to be there, as opposed to products that are there on merit? Cheers.
Dylan Buckley
@mickc79 This was bound to happen unfortunately, and it means PH will loose its value to true makers. It will just be a directory who have paid them.
Ryan Hoover
@mickc79 valid questions! Our hope is that Ship provides far more value than the amount people pay. We'll be offering a variety of features, some of which are wildly undervalued imho. For example, we offer unlimited emailing for Pro and Super Pro plans which could cost several thousands of dollars with other email management tools. We're very open to feedback and eager to see what features people want and use. Regarding product promotion, we're introducing annotations to make it clear which product received placement via Ship Pro or Super Pro. This currently only applies to Upcoming Landing Pages and does not affect the placement of a launched product you'll find in the daily feed.
Stefan Aichholzer
The free version seems alright. However, if you want to get a little more control and metrics, $47/month seems a little too expensive, it's not like we are going to be releasing several new products per month, furthermore and in my personal case, most things I do/release are free, open source, thus not a single cent is made. Perhaps it would be an idea to offer something like a PRO version for open source projects.
Justin Mitchell
@aichholzer 100% agree. I think this sets a dangerous precedent as well that to succeed you must pay. I want to keep the purity of PH alive and keep allowing indie makers and open source projects to shine without forcing them to cough up money they don't have.
Nick Abouzeid
@aichholzer @itsthisjustin Valid points. We're absolutely dedicated to the community here. To address this, we're introducing annotations to make it clear which product received placement via Ship Pro or Super Pro. This currently only applies to Upcoming Landing Pages and won't affect the placement of a launched product you'll find in the daily feed.
Guillaume Flandre
Awesome! I already loved the idea of Upcoming by itself, but building a full suite for product launches and iterations makes a lot of sense. I'm wondering how it's going to work for the Basic plan. It says there's 1 landing page included. Does that mean for next product launches, an upgrade is necessary? If so, would you consider adding a per-launch plan with only access to Upcoming?
Ryan Hoover
@gflandre currently the Basic plan allows you to have one active Upcoming Landing Page so you could replace a prior product launch with something new.
Guillaume Flandre
@rrhoover Got it, that's even better :)
Alexandre Mouriec
Product Hunt is a company I ❀️ so much and the team is full of people I appreciate and find very inspiring πŸ™ They created something really big, especially for my generation. Monetization is needed but sometimes hard to find #startuplife I am so happy to learn that today, they are launching Ship, a toolkit for makers to ship awesome products πŸš€ and the 1st step for them to monetize. My experience on PH was amazing ! They are helping people launch products from all over the world, without the need to be in SV. I was able to have so many awesome opportunities thanks to the community they created. I was able to launch products seen by several thousands of people, just from my college bedroom, and meet makers from all over the world. I am not the only one and I won't be the last one πŸ™Œ I am looking forward to launch my next project thanks to Ship ! Seeing Upcoming evolve to Ship today is the perfect example of a great MVP. Great job Product Hunt Team πŸ‘ πŸš€ I just wrote this post on Linkedin but I think its place is also on Product Hunt :)
Khoa Phan
Holy ship! Perfect timing, as we'll be launching the next version of our product soon.
Khoa Phan
Here's our Ship page: https://www.producthunt.com/upco.... Would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you all might have! Thanks a lot.
Kunal Bhatia
Upcoming has been really valuable and an instant hit with the chat-inspired landing pages. Nice work Ship-ping! πŸ™Œ πŸš€
Ramy
Launching soon!
Just upgraded to pro - I imagine the value of the product will increase over time as y'all continue to iterate. Nice work everyone involved! My main issue thus far with the Upcoming page is I didn't get notified when people responded to a message. Not sure if that was my settings or it just wasn't implemented yet - but apart from that it's been a super valuable way to reach new people.
Ryan Hoover
@ramykhuffash fortunately, we fixed that UX bug shortly after Messaging's v1 launch. You should receive a notification when your subscribers reply to you going forward. 😊
Vinish Garg
My Upcoming page was featured on 25 Aug, https://www.producthunt.com/upco.... Is it automatically a part of Ship's basic (free) plan? And if I buy a plan, say Pro, I am not sure for how long I need to pay for it? Till I launch my product and stop using the Product Hunt Upcoming page (by deleting it)?
Nick Abouzeid
@vingar Yep! You're automatically enrolled in the Basic plan. The idea is that you should continue to use your Upcoming page after your launch as well, updating the copy to tease what you're going to release in the coming months to entice new subscribers.
Nick Abouzeid
@vingar We're doing our best πŸ™
David West
Really do love the look of this and can't wait to get using it. If the tool could offer polling of future feature requests for customers and quite a flexible way of updating users on what's coming... there's absolutely no way I won't be using this for every future launch going forward.
Ryan Hoover
@david_west thanks, David! Surveys and polls are currently in development.
Stefan Rasmussen
Launching Product Hunt stuff on Product Hunt!! love it 😍
Dimo Trifonov
The growth hack with the request and the paid plans is sooooo smart!
Ben Lang
Top Product
Incredible execution on this! Congrats!
Someone Named
This looks great! I suspect demand will be huge. One question - what does Product Promotion include?
John Alexander
I bet investors are happy with this πŸ’Έ