How I successfully launched Bookicious on ProductHunt

And what I learned in the process.

Recently Bookicious.com got featured on ProductHunt and it was a great success, and in this post I am going to describe my experience and what I learned as #1 on ProductHunt.

For you to completely understand the story, I am going to explain a bit of context about what is Bookicious and how I created it.

Note: Sorry if there are spelling mistakes, I am from Mexico City and English is not my main language, also if you speak Spanish, you can also read the spanish version of this article in my blog.

What is Bookicious?

Bookicious is a website that helps you discover news books by browsing book collections of recommended books by famous entrepreneurs, founders and makers, just like Sam Altman, Larry Page, Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg and many more.

Bookicious collections

The initial idea is that users can browse and find great books for reading, based on great experienced people, and not just buying books that claim to be good, but not necessarily are.

In this moment, Bookicious is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) but despite this, it is very attractive and that made it to #1 in ProductHunt.

What problem does Bookicious solves?

Great startups or products tries to solve a problem, and the problem that Bookicious tries to solve is finding a great book to read.

Sam Altman Collection

I created it because I spend a lot of time looking for great books to read, mainly books related to startups and business, and now, thanks to Bookicious I got hundreds of great books to read.

Also when we get featured on ProductHunt, a lot of people messaged me on Twitter and Slack with messages like:

Great site Mauro, just bought 8 books from your site. Thank you!

So I think Bookicious really solves that problem. It is easier to find a great book to read as you can browse great books recommended by great people.

What is ProductHunt?

Just in case you don’t know, let me explain you about it. ProductHunt is a website that features the best products everyday.

ProductHunt is a very important site for startups, as It can help you get known by a lot of people and give you a great users boost.

So if you are a entrepreneur or startup founder, take a look at it. Even if you are not, I am 99.9% sure that you will actually love it, as It help you discover incredible products everyday.

My Experience launching Bookicious

The adventure starts here.

After a brief introduction, let’s start with my experience launching on ProductHunt, and what I learned from it.

It was about 2:00 a.m. in Mexico City (i.e. 12:00 a.m. in San Francisco) and I was lying on my bed trying to sleep.

Suddenly, I hear the notification sound from Inbox app that means I got a new email, and I thought “I will better check it out tomorrow” but after a few seconds I thought “it might be something important” and when I turn on my iPhone screen, I saw a mail from Erik Torenberg, member of ProductHunt titled “Bookicious on ProductHunt” and I knew what that meant.

Fastly I get out of the bed, turned on the lights and turned on my computer, because as we all know, you shouldn't sleep while being featured on ProductHunt, or horrible things could happen with your product (bugs on the site, the server crashes, etc).

I went to ProductHunt.com and effectively, Bookicious was featured and It was in #1 with 12 upvotes.

And then, the adventure began. I started to recieve a lot of visitors from ProductHunt and similar sites like TheNews.im.

I was a bit worried about the server going to crash, but fortunately, everything went well.

It was a chaotic moment. I was rapidly monitoring that the server was working well, answering the questions on comments, and working on the feedback and suggestions on the site.

Most of the people on comments gave great feedback to improve the website, and I tried to take care of that the fastest way possible.

Rollo Wenlock wrote “Why only men?” and I thought “fuck, how could I have forgotten to add women founders, it is very important” and I started working on it stunning fast. Only 30 minutes later, the Marissa Mayer collection was added, and before finishing the day, there was 3 women collections added.

While being on ProductHunt, I learned the following:

Take care of feedback as fastest as you can.

Users will appreciate it and you will make your product even better. This is a very important tip.

In the launch day, I fixed more than 15 bugs, added 4 collections and thesources feature. People from PH can help you a lot to make your product better, so pay attention to them.

Answer questions/comments as fast as you can.

ProductHunt algorithm take care of upvotes and comments to rank you in the page, so answer people questions as fast as possible so you can go up to the first place on PH.

Don’t ask for upvotes.

As ProductHunt guideline says, you must not ask for upvotes. It is normal to share your product on ProductHunt in Twitter, Facebook, Slack, etc. but do not ask for upvotes, or you can be penalized.

Finally, after much work, solving bugs, and taking care of feedback the day ended and Bookicious was still on #1 place on ProductHunt with 630 upvotes and 60 comments.

What is the future of Bookicious?

Thanks to ProductHunt, Bookicious got a big traffic boost and even today, It continues having visitors.

I received more than 85,000 pageviews from ProductHunt users, more than 650 people subscribed to email newsletter and hundreds of people bought great books from our site.

So what started as a side project I created in 10 days, now haves a lot of happy visitors, and really helped a lot of people to find great books to read.

After this huge successful launch, I am adding great new features and collections to Bookicious, so keep an eye on it.

Conclusion

It was a great adventure to launch and become #1 on ProductHunt, so I thanks everyone who commented, upvoted and supported us!

Finally, this was the story of how in less than 10 days I created Bookicious and took it to the 1st place of ProductHunt.

Also, this is the story of how I, Mauro Sicard, a 18 years old guy from Mexico City who dropout from school to create amazing things archived the 1st place on ProductHunt, the world’s leading startup website, and above all, how you can do it too.

SOURCE: https://medium.com/@maurosicard/how-i-successfully-launched-bookicious-on-producthunt-672172420f18