Last week I did something I’d never done before.

Launched a product on ProductHunt for the first time.

The product: Awesome Directories. A curated aggregator of places to submit your projects for visibility.

The result: 11 upvotes. NOT featured. Essentially invisible.

But first launches aren’t about winning. They’re about learning.

Here’s what 3 weeks of pre-launch campaigning got me:

• 800 unique visitors
• 7 email signups (0.9% conversion)
• 2.75 pages viewed per visitor
• A baseline I can now improve against

The lessons I’m taking forward:

Build the community before the launch. ProductHunt rewards people who’ve been active there for months. I showed up cold.

3 weeks isn’t enough. For small creators, momentum takes 2-3 months minimum.

Direct asks work. The 7 email signups came from explicit CTAs, not passive browsing.

Social reach ≠ traffic. 15k LinkedIn followers got me 200 impressions (%1.33). That’s the real math.

First launch in the books. Data collected. On to iteration.

— Meysam

P.S. Unrelated but published this week: a reflection on how AI coding assistants killed my joy of programming. It feels like using cheat codes—exciting, then hollow. Read it here →