Post–launch Audiobites

On Monday, September 20th 2021, Audio Bites was launched on Product Hunt (PH). It was the first product I have ever launched as a full time maker. This is an overview of how it went.

Launch!

Audio Bites was made available on PH at 10:34 UTC+01 / 02:34 PST. Through the day, I shared the website on various subreddits and online groups after agreeing with the moderators that the product might be of interest to them. The groups that the product was shared were about podcasts, side projects and startups. Apart from online communities I emailed Life Hacker but received no response.

Stats

The launch brought 573 unique users to the website. The top three were:

• Direct, 249 visitors
• Product Hunt, 167 visitors
• Reddit, 82 visitors

The medium average time staying on the website was 33 seconds. Users coming from Product Hunt (47s) and Reddit (49s) seemed to have the highest time on the website. The app had a lot of possitive feedback on both of those platforms. People kept commenting through the day, upvoting and giving feedback and suggestions so that might have contributed to this.

Out of all the visitors, 33 ended up creating and downloading an Audio Bite. Google Analytics reports '69 clicks' but I am not sure if that includes video playback or not and whether drop down menus selected counts towards a click.

Takeaways

Overall, the launch was a very positive experience, despite it being overwhelming and sort of an emotional roller coaster. Monitoring traffic, stats, discussions, notifications all from different sites can be quite draining. I am certain there is a better way of handling launches without feeling that drained and it probably comes from experience.

Other than the positive feedback the product received, people suggested a lot of improvements and features they would love to see. I also received some requests for partnerships and collaborations with other makers working in similar areas and there was a person asking for a paid version of the product.

Reality Check

The launch seems to have been quite successful for what Audio Bites was planned to do; give me an understanding of building and launcing a product. I can keep having releases like this one, but it would not mean much without the products evolving into profitable businesses.

There are a few ideas on how to approach a business model for Audio Bites. Trying to monetize it now might not be worth it. For the time being I will continue working on the next product and see how Audio Bites grows (or dies) until then.

👋 Thank you for reading. Follow me on Twitter to be notified when I release a new product or publish a new article. You can also find more frequent updates between releases there.