Launching with a New Strategy
December 12th, here we come! 🚀
Hi, I am Wenting. I quit my job at Adobe to build a startup, Typogram, the most beginner-friendly logo design tool for founders. I started this newsletter on Aug 2, 2021 to document my journey.
Hi friends, I hope you had a good week. With the blink of an eye, we are in December. Can you believe there are only 30 days left in 2023?
In this final 8% of the year, we are launching the next iteration of Typogram. Exact date – December 12th, on Product Hunt. I’m currently working on two significant features to meet this deadline (more on those soon).
Today, I want to discuss our strategies for past launches and what we are doing differently this time.
Our Previous Launches
So far, we have launched Typogram twice on Product Hunt. For both launches, we mostly bet on the launch events themselves. The goal has always been to secure a top spot so we get a spike in our traffic and marketing, acquiring paid users for our app.
Here are some snapshots:
Pre-order Launch, March 2022
This is our first launch for Typogram. We mainly prepared a few days before the launch by sharing snippets of our product and a teaser in our newsletter, Twitter, and Reddit. And promoted throughout the day. Our results:
16 pre-orders
1500 traffic during the first two weeks of launch
10th Product of the Day
A key takeaway from this first launch: the first few hours are extra important
By the way, we are running our Holiday Launch Sale until our PH launch on December 12th. 🎁 Enjoy 40% off Typogram single brand lifetime license with the code HOLIDAY2023
Alpha Launch, April 2023
On April this year, we launched our alpha on Product Launch. This time, we took more time to prepare, contacting our community of friends and previous customers in advance to gather support, especially the first few hours of the launch, a lesson we learned from our pre-order launch.
Unfortunately, we were locked in the Product Hunt landing page jail for the initial vital hours. Typogram only made it onto the homepage many hours later. Even though we felt like we were rubbed out of the top three spots, our community carried us through.
100 new users on the launch day and 130 new sign-ups the following week
9 converted to paid user, 4% conversion
No. 5 Product of the Day
You can follow our actions here! 🚀
December 12th Launch
New Strategy
Reflecting on our past launches, every time we optimized our marketing for the launch, our focus was always 100% on the actual event.
Learning from our April launch, we adjusted our thinking. We realize PH launches can be a vehicle instead of a single event. Instead of considering the PH launch as the solitary main event, we could see it as the culminating event. That way, we can grow and build hype around the product in multiple ways.
So, we are trying a new experiment.
First Three Weeks
Rather than promoting intensely for two weeks right before and concentrating solely on the launch event, we have been promoting the whole month, with the first three weeks centered on broadening our reach. Hua created a content bank from our previous blog posts and newsletter issues. We then crafted tweets, posts, and graphics and scheduled them on our Twitter accounts. We are focusing on:
Grow subscribers for our build-in-public newsletter (almost 900!)
Gain free account users and increase exposure to Typogram
Increase our Twitter audience before the launch to maximize reach
Final Week
In the final week, we’ll focus more intensely on Product Hunt, utilizing methods we learned from previous launches.
Gather the support of our friends from different time zones
Get active on product hunt community forums
Mystery launch photoshoot (this is something fun we are doing- can’t wait to share with you more )
Launch exclusive post with call the action to PH launch soon page
How is it going?
We are in the third week, and I’ve been scheduling and posting tweets. I’ll continue to do this next week and start doing more behind-the-scenes work exclusively for the launch.
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See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding startups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them.