We have handed the control of social media to people who have all the time in the world to consistently share crap: mindless questions, low-quality aggressive opinionated posts, meme-sharing, snippets of their inexperienced wisdom, and mundane daily updates.
OK. So. I launched something on ProductHunt.
In the meantime, shared it on Reddit and along with my feelings on HackerNews. Besides sharing on X and here on LinkedIn.
That is almost the complete extent of what I can do to promote something on my social media. From early in the morning to late in the night, I tried to push it more.
I got "35 visits" to the actual project website.
So, dear friends and fellow builders:
- the size of the buttons on the landing page does not matter,
- which wording you use does not matter
- extreme optimizations to your website do not matter.
- even whatever missing features you feel your product has do not matter.
- even trivial bugs you discovered that only happen when you behave in a weird combination of actions does not matter.
They only matter if you're able to show it to a thousand visitors at least. Preferably, regularly.
Because only then, you can optimize conversion. You can optimize your product and / or landing page to whatever the hell you feel is wrong that you need to convert more people to buy something / become members.
Execution is important, and now distribution became a bigger problem.
So, those accounts boasting tens of thousands of social media followers, making fun of individuals who underline the importance of their "distribution" power in validating ideas, "gently" need to be corrected—they're mistaken that "execution" alone guarantees success, and behave like they could launch a successful product without the power of their distribution channels.
But we have already handed the control of social media to people who have all the time in the world to consistently share trivial content: mindless questions, low-quality aggressive opinionated posts, meme-sharing, snippets of their inexperienced wisdom, and mundane daily updates. Despite lacking substance, their consistent presence has earned them the title of "influencers".
TLDR; Don't do anything to your product unless 1.000 people, at least 100s see it regularly, and iteratively you improve by their feedbacks. But first find or become a distribution channel to provide that.
