How to make your launch go viral - AMA w/ CEO of Wispr Flow

@marko_jurisic 2 months of preparation, 0 days of promotion.

@marko_jurisic @tanaykothari 👌👌👌

@mzkvisuals I would say a personal network accounted for maybe 10% of the engagement on PH. For the first launch, I shared it with a lot of my personal communities. For the most recent one, it was primarily the Wispr Flow community that was supporting it.

for our first launch, we had @chrismessina hunt us, and for the second launch, it was actually @rajiv_ayyangar (CEO of ProductHunt). For both cases, I wanted to make sure that they use the product and love the product before they hunt us, so that they can share their genuine feedback.

I believe for a lot of the product and community, they hear these names a lot and they have begun to trust what the influential hunters have to say. It helps add some more credibility.

@mzkvisuals  @chrismessina  @rajiv_ayyangar  @tanaykothari How did you get the hunters to hunt your product? I'd love to use this approach for our upcoming launch.

Previously I just cold emailed and cold dm'd hunters but didnt get much responses.

@alan_rivera I think you actually have a really big benefit by being a solo developer because there's a lot of communities on Reddit, Twitter, and WhatsApp groups that really respect solo developers and help give new developers a chance at success.

(I sometimes feel bad that I can't use them anymore because now we have a full team)

I've been a solo developer for most of my life, and it takes guts to go out there by yourself and build something. I'm sure you'll find a lot of people who would appreciate and support you for that.

@tanaykothari 

Do you have any recommendations on communities that solo developers can interact with that would get results?

@alxrda It's a science and an art.

ProductHunt, imo, makes a lot of sense for companies who are launching a new experience and want people who are engaged and will give feedback. I've loved the people I've met through the ProductHunt community, and they are the users who help make Flow really incredible. But I also spend time talking to about 50 users a week.

Product Hunt is something that if you do, do it well, or don't do it at all. I see some companies half-ass it - sometimes where marketing lead says they need to do this, and they put together some assets and don't engage any further. I think that is a waste of time and possibly even hurts their brand.

@tanaykothari  thanks for the answer. I'll do it for Actor when we'll be ready for a launch.

@tanaykothari  Any strategies and tactics you can share on how u got those 50 users a week?

@linklogician What we found is that it is challenging to ask people who have supported you on one platform to then go and look at you on another platform as well. Because it doesn't necessarily add too much value to them. Because often times if we're doing a single launch it's the same story that we're telling people across platforms.

We treat each channel as a specific way to get to unique audiences.

For the really loyal and highly excited users, we give them the channels and the exact links: "Hey, we are going live on these channels, and you can support us here." - and those users are great

@linklogician @tanaykothari This is very useful. Loyal user feedback is really important. It can help us recognize many of our own problems and also understand what capabilities most users like. Recently, through communicating with users, we found that our UI design was a bit complicated and lacked good guidance. Then we made improvements promptly.

@gabe A lot, lot, lot of preparation.

From the marketing side, you're telling a story that should really resonate with people. It should either be something that people feel very relatable to or is one that brings up a lot of controversy. We haven't really cracked the latter, but I think we do a good job on the relatability.

On the product side, there is no excuse than building an experience that users feel genuinely delighted about. When you start hearing people say things like "This is a product that's changed my life", "This is the best tool I've used", it leads to a lot of organic word-of-mouth.

@joyce_kremer A big part of it is genuinely caring about the community. We personally respond to everyone who engages with us. There's somebody who's taking out time from their day to take a look at something you built, try it out, share their genuine feedback or excitement with you, and I really value that.

@tanaykothari Love that, sounds truly genuine! It probably helps if everyone brings that mindset to the table and collaboratively help each other. Will keep that in mind while getting started on Product Hunt!

@nigelcd Thanks a lot, Nigel! Appreciate the kind words from you.

@rajiv_ayyangar Biggest learning - building great consumer products is all about building habits.

Wispr Flow was actually the 8th product we built internally. The first 7 had to do with taking actions on your computer and were genuinely impressive tools (similar to OpenAI's Operator, etc.). But people used it once a day (that too if they remembered).

We decided to bet on voice dictation for communication - people spend 90% of their time on computers either consuming content or communicating. And that bet has paid off.

@tanaykothari Voice dictation is particularly interesting to me because it's such an old category. It makes it hard to deliver something that's so much better than prior art that it feels magical - And yet, from my perspective, you've really done it. When I've tried to adopt voice dictation software in the past, I had thoughts like, "Oh, I must just not think in speech. Maybe my thinking process is too wedded to typing". I do think that is the case but now I'm realizing that maybe I can change the way I think for a lot of writing because it's so much faster.

@rajiv_ayyangar  @tanaykothari Voice communication is a more efficient and simplified way of communication. So your thinking is correct. Then someone will say, "This product is really great."

@leah_madden Our first launch was 5 months ago, and the most recent launch was yesterday.

I think getting #1 of the day is cool, but what really matters at the end of the day is what you do with those users who get started on your platform. How do you best take their feedback, improve your product, and take it to the next level?

For me, it's not the end-all-be-all, it's just a starting point.

@james_keppel You're in it! Just ask a question here and Tanay will respond soon.

@cameron_froese I wouldn't wait particularly. I would however spend my initial time interacting with other makers, and sharing feedback with them, just as you would want to receive :)

@tanaykothari thank you! that makes a sense