Lists Kit launch retrospective

A post-mortem on the launch of my latest product, Lists Kit

I launched Lists Kit about two weeks ago. It’s my latest paid product after a long dry season of not launching anything new or profit-generating.

A bit of retrospective and reflection:

Launch stats:

• Replies: 41

• RTs: 41

• Likes: 116

• Impressions: 23k

• Sales to date: 2

Things old and new I tried that worked

• Building in public: I was building Lists Kit in public since Nov 2023. Constantly sharing updates, interesting stories, new features, asking questions, getting feedback. So by the time I launch it 3 months later, it had built up quite a bit of compressed ‘energy’ and awareness.

• Pre-launch: As usual, doing pre-launch works, because of the build-up and people are aware and notified beforehand to support the launch. I’ve done this before, for my last launch of Sheet2Bio, so I know this works. I foreshadowed a launch “next week” on 20 Jan, then announced on 24 Jan that I will indeed launch on 26 Jan and asked people if they like to support the launch and be notified via DM. 31 replies from it means I won’t be launching cold on X.

• Meme video: This is new. I’ve never launched a product with a meme video before, but seeing the success that Marc Lou—Product Hunt Maker of the Year 2024—had with his meme launch videos inspired me to at least try. I could have just done a typical screen recording to demo the product, but since it’s a boilerplate on Github, I’m not sure if there’s anything interesting to show of someone forking a repo. Moreover, I was also racking my brain on what to write for the launch tweet, and felt that I didn’t know how to capture the essence of Lists Kit in 280 characters. Among media types, videos get a bit more boost than images, so a launch video sounded like a good idea.

• Hinting for support through RTs, QTs: I think this really helps amplify your launch because then you’re then also leveraging on other people’s audience size. It’s probably not cool to outright demand for a RT or QT. So I merely suggested a few things they can do in the launch DM with the embedded launch tweet and left it to them to decide. This was how I phrased it:
  "Hey , grateful for your offering to support my twitter launch. Here it is! Please feel free to do anything you like to support the launch – like, reply, RT, QT, buy or refer a friend 🙏🙏 Thank you! ☺️ "

• Sharing it with friends and chat groups: I’m part of some small indie hacking chat groups on X and Telegram where we chat a lot, and I shared them there to ask for support. This works well if there’s some familiarity and trust within the group, as people are more willing to support you since they know you and genuinely support one another.

• Artificial scarcity: Borrowing from other indie hackers’ launch tricks, I tried introducing some artificial scarcity too in terms of discount – “First 100 will get $100 discount”. This usually helps but it’s unfortunately not a silver bullet when the product has no fit to the channel/audience. I do like that I get to experiment with the pricing too, to see how people respond to different price ranges.

Lessons I learned from things that didn’t work

• Delayed launch, lost momentum: I took 3 months from inception to launch, but I felt I could have launched it after 2 months actually. But it coincided with the Xmas and New Year holidays. Nobody would be around to see the launch. So I delayed it some more, and also waited for feedback from beta users to come back. By mid Jan I felt like the momentum was starting to wane, and the algo was changing again and my build in public tweets about it starting to do less well. I also started to feel my motivation waning myself. So while the building in public for 3 months was good for ‘compressing the spring’, there’s also such a thing as taking too long and missing the most opportune window.

• No channel-offer fit: The biggest lesson from this is how there’s no channel-offer fit. I somewhat suspected all along, based on the comments and feedback I get from building in public, during the beta phase and when seeking feedback. So the conversion fail from the X launch confirms it – folks in my audience engaged as a fellow builder, not as a potential interested customer. But the lingering question remains: “How do I know there’s a market beyond my audience on X?” Fact remains: There’s a lively HTML templates market on the internet, on Themeforest etc. The presence of long-standing competitors proves there is demand. I just got to carve out a slice of that pie. That pie so happens to not overlap with my audience on X, that’s all. I got to seek new distribution and marketing channels, communities and places where my customer hang out. This is also a signal that I should be super selective and ruthlessly curate the feedback I get from my X audience, because I might end up building features for the wrong people. Things like bugs, style – yes. Things like price, feature set – no. Things like copy and media – it depends, maybe… like relating to sentence structure, length or media format, but not for positioning, messaging, whether it feels convincing.

• Viral tweet the day before: I went somewhat viral the day before with a 67k impressions tweet talking about the “I am done. I give up” HN post. I always wonder if that stole the thunder from the launch tweet a bit, because these days viral tweets can last 48h, sometimes even 72h (compared to past where a tweet ‘expires’ after 24h). So when the algo had to decide which tweet to show to my followers, it felt that more likely they will show the viral tweet the day before than my launch tweet. Can’t confirm, but could be a learning point to not tweet the day before, or tweet about the launch instead.

• Launch tweet time: I got delayed producing the meme video and only posted my launch tweet at 5:30pm Singapore time which was between 9:30am-10:30am in Europe. Truth is I wanted to post it way earlier, like 2-3pm, give it some time to build up, because tweets these days seem to have a slower build up of 1-2h before it gets shown in people’s timelines and start to get replies and likes. So I might have posted it too late, because I want the launch tweet to show up when Europe wakes up, then by the time it builds up enough engagement, it will be more salient on US-based feeds.

What other things did you observe about the Lists Kit launch that was done well, or could be done better?

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