What I learned from launching a design system on Product Hunt
What was the product?
I’ve been working as a product designer for the past three years. I’ve recently made the move to Sketch App and I’m really loving it. Symbols are really a game-changing feature and I fell in love with it directly.
After getting the hang of it and learning on how to create symbol-based design system, I decided to create a design system that would work for a huge amount of subjects, such as blogs, landing pages, web apps, e-commerce shops and more.
This design system is flexible, customizable and resizable. You can quickly override values in the Inspector thanks to the Symbols feature. Also by making use of the recent Resizing feature, almost every components and widgets is responsive and adapts to different sizes of containers.
I decided to sell two versions of the product, a basic one which included only the components (more than 130, including buttons, text areas, drop downs and many more) and a full version one which included every component and widget (more than 65 from 4 main categories).
Before launching
After giving the final touches to the respective Sketch files, I made everything ready for the two folders (by adding a PDF guide) and zipped the folders. After that, something funny happened. I’ve been procrastinating on getting my personal website live for over half a year now, but I really needed a place to put the UI kit landing page for download, so it was necessary to get my personal website ready.
Because of this product launch I actually got my website live now, even though it’s really minimal (and I’m actually liking how it looks). After setting up the website I set up a Google Analytics page for it so I could track the live activity and get some information about the visitors and potential buyers.
Fun fact, do you know that if you have uBlock activated you can’t actually see the Analytics dashboard? It took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out what was wrong with it.
After creating everything necessary for the Product Hunt launch, I sat there and waited for midnight to come to see my product live on Product Hunt.
What I’ve learned from launching
Timing is everything
If there something is important that you should always keep in mind before launching, is timing. The biggest mistake I made is that I didn’t actually see what was supposed to happen that day. I decided to launch my product on 12 September, and when I decided it I actually forgot that Apple was supposed to have their new iPhone introduced that day. Before the Apple event began I was wandering around the 4th-5th place in PH (which was actually a good results) but as soon as the new products from Apple were introduced I got pushed down the list. By getting pushed down the list that early in the day (it was still 12pm in San Francisco), I killed a lot of chances to get more traffic and sales.
Be extra active in social medias
It’s really important that in the day of the launch you should be really active in social medias to push even more traffic to the PH page, especially in the start where you’re fighting to get the initial upvotes. I decided to post on Twitter and Dribbble. I retweeted the tweets from ProductHuntHi related to my product and also tweeted my PH comments. The more you tweet, the more traffic you will bring to the page. Also consider posting screenshots from Analytics, live stats and reactions. I also posted on Dribbble because it’s supposed to be the home of designers. It didn’t get much traction there. In my opinion, Dribbble’s front page is currently bloated with garbage designs, which generally are eye candy with no functionality in mind whatsoever, but it this something to be talked about in another article.
Be active and responsive
Try getting rid of every appointment in your agenda that day. It’s extremely important to be active on that day and follow everything closely. Respond to the comments really quick and give valuable information to questions from potential buyers.
Conclusion
In retrospective, I wish I had launched on another day (Thanks Apple), but other than that it went well and I got a nice result. I was limited a lot by the mistakes I made and obviously I could reach my expectations if I launched in another day. But, in overall I got my work’s worth when it comes to the profit, and I also got 350+ upvotes for my first product.
