As a developer I've always had a problem : Find new concepts to learn. ๐จโ๐ป
You can learn concepts at work with your colleagues, by contributing to open source projects or by reading articles like here.
But not enough to appease this internal need to learn...
I needed a faster way that could show me directly a concept and I will do the rest to learn it on my own (as I've been doing since the day I wrote my first line of code).
Thus, I've built this website and named it Stanza.dev based on 3 simple points
- Short posts presenting a concept ๐งโ๐ป
- Illustrated with a code snippet โ๏ธ
- With a reading list of articles to go further (DEV.to, Medium, etc.) ๐
After building my MVP in one month: ok let's show it to the world with the easiest way I know : Product Hunt
Preparing the launch โ๏ธ
Product Hunt is very simple : every day you have a bunch of products that are published and people just upvote the ones they love.
Timezone ๐ ๐ ๐
Yep but actually I live in Europe and ProductHunt is based on US timezone. Thus, I programmed my post to be published at 00.02 am on the website and then remain 24hours online. Don't ask me why not 00.01, I just had a bad feeling about it ... ๐คทโโ๏ธ
Metrics ๐
One of the most important thing before you launch : set up google analytics (or what you want) to get metrics.
Content ๐ท โ๏ธ ๐
Many start ups are making very nice videos about their product, nice illustrations and animated gifs.
I did none of that because it was out of my budget (0โฌ) and I was in this kind of state that : If my product is useful for people they don't need all of this to try it.
I have to say that Stanza.dev is a side project for me, not a big startup, but if you have the budget or a very complexe product maybe it's better to add all this branding magic on you post. โจ
Three screenshot later I was ready ๐
Launch ๐
I woke up and just wait that my post was published automatically at 00.02am (us timezone).
Getting more upvotes ๐โโ๏ธ ๐โโ๏ธ
I had the chance to remain on the front page the whole day ! If not you go directly in the "see more" list and of course you reach less people.
I had some traffic but I did something after a few hours that increased my number of votes :
ProductHunt gives you an embed link that shows a button on your site saying you are on ProductHunt. People coming from ProductHunt will go to your website and then it's like a reminder saying "Hey don't forget to upvote Stanza if you like it !". And I can't give you numbers here (as I don't remember) but I've seen the number of votes increasing.
Getting more signups ๐ค
I had more people coming to Stanza.dev, a few of them were singing up but I did something that changed radically the signup ratio between visitors and people who actually signed up : I showed to them that other developers were signing up.
I've added the github avatar of the last registered users on the main page and I think that visitors got a more "community experience" than before.
Once I did that, I've seen more people creating accounts and sharing coding concepts.
Global metrics ๐งโ๐ซ
Total traffic ๐ต ๐บ
I've got around 720 users during the 24hours of my post (there are still more users coming two days after). You can generate much more traffic than me but still I am very happy with this number !
Total signups โ
I had zero users on my website when I launched (just me), and in 24hours I got 81 other developers signing up. In other words, 11,25% of visitors that came to stanza.dev signed up.
Two days after ๐
We are now 96 developers on Stanza, sharing our best coding concept together thanks to ProductHunt.
Feel free to join us ๐ https://stanza.dev
See you on https://stanza.dev ๐
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