🦚 The aftermath of launching

Hey there! 👋

This week I launched my first startup, Letdir, and it has been really exciting and fun for me to work on. I shipped with a lot of features missing, but that's much of the essence itself.

Some of the features currently in progress includes adding a favourites tab where you can save your favourites, and collections where you can share your own 'newsletter' stack 🔜

It was far from a smooth launch, however, and I somehow neglected a lot of marketing at the time because I was consumed elsewhere.

On the morning of launch day, whilst already published on Product Hunt, I had a Vercel deployment error.

Imagine the horror going through my body at that moment.

I believe I spent around an hour or two trying to fix it: turns out it was a bad library I installed called 'sharp'. Luckily I managed to fix it before the 'official' launch I had set for 2pm CET.

Because I failed to do marketing on the day of the launch, though, it helped me realize that it is important to have fun whilst doing these things.

A lot of founders are worried sick about the numbers they should achieve when launching, and that is an unhealthy mindset.

I created Letdir because it's a tool I've wanted for the past three years. So, I built it in large part for myself.

It's easy to get lost in the numbers when you have to do a great deal of marketing. Perhaps this is why it is important to find a right balance.

I barely spent any time on social media on my launch day, and I absolutely loved it.

It gave me time to focus on what I love: building.

Immediately after launching Letdir, I had lunch, and started adding more newsletters onto my platform. It was a lot of fun. And I could tell that so many of the newsletters genuinely wanted to teach and learn.

Still, it was the wrong move. Because whilst i was adding newsletters, I failed to put my product in the hands of the right people, an essential though difficult part of indie hacking.

I should have found a balance that met the need of marketing to my friends on Twitter, along with having fun and adding newsletters.

The key is to not think about the numbers at all.

You cannot expect to receive a certain amount of likes or followers, that is completely outside of your control. What you can do is do your best to market your product, build it, and have fun with it.

This line of thinking comes from stoicism, I recommend checking it out if you ever feel stressed about numbers.

→ Do you often stress about the numbers of your launch or Twitter journey? Have you done anything about it yet?

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Anyway, I thought I'd show you the results of my launch regardless! How does that sound friend?

Here it is. 140 unique visitors and 525 page views over 7 days.

Product Hunt I believe I got around 3-5 likes on the product. As I was sharing the link, it didn't work apparently!

Some of the most popular newsletters include Just Ship It​ by Marc Lou, Fake Mayo by Jakob Jelling, and The Intrinsic Perspective by Erik Hoel.

The most popular categories are Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, Business, Education ​and Technology.

Couldn't be more thankful! 💌

Speak soon?

Magnus 🦚