This is going to be a flow of what I encountered when I launched my product Miskowin.com on Product Hunt.

Lessons:

• My Social Media Presence is abysmal
• My Application wasn't quite ready
• I need to keep dedicated to learning

Social Media Presence

I am not much of a social media guy. I often worry about what the impression I will give when I comment, post etc... Will it impact my future? What if I am wrong? What if I share something that is inappropriate that I regret?

This has held me back, am I getting older now and shouldn't care as much? Should I have cared that much before? i don't know if I have those answers.

I was not able to reach the amount of people I needed to in order to generate traffic to my site. I did however get one upvote on the day, somehow and I thank the person who made it. Hope it wasn't an AI built to make founders feel better, but thats what happened. It did keep me engaged.

So I am going to fix this part. It is going to take some 'training' and some effort but I think it will make me a better professional in my field if I am not nervous about reaching out to people.

Here are some goals I am starting to work on personally. Lets start with the platforms I am going to post to.

• LinkedIn
• Redit
• Facebook
• YouTube
• X

I plan on posting semi regularly to these platforms to increase my distribution. For the most part I will use a product called Postiz to help automate this, Ideally I will write a single post and it will go to all platforms. I will let you know how well that works or if it is even possible with Postiz. Youtube and X are exceptions to this, YouTube will be manual and X, WTF, posting to X costs money? I think when I created my developer account they put me into a pay per use tier, a new preview tier. There is no way to convert to a free tier.

I am also taking a course on Social Media marketing. This should give me a good foundation to ensure I do it consistently and use the right.... lets call it ... tone. I don't want to start sounding like a selling bot.

Application State

They say, just launch it, just launch it. So I did. It is better to ship and get feedback than to build in a vacuum and never get feedback. That is true but, it doesn't make me feel good. Its one thing to have a bug, and another to have something that I can't even look at to use.

I will get over my feelings, no its not perfect, likely never going to be, and not for everyone. I do my best and thats what I can do. I have started using some feature flags to hide some things until I feel they are ready.

I was more focused on what the process was going to be for people, the employees and just people who don't belong to a company in the application. I neglected the part that will be the bill payer. The organizations, the companies that I am actually targeting to be paying users. My goal is to pay per user per month. But I didn't build 'enough' things that companies would actually need.

I have since received feedback from HR professionals who have provided some ideas I need to work toward that would more align with their needs. I have experience in the management aspect, but their feedback has elevated my product as a result.

Continuous Learning

This part is more obvious, its not just learning the stack, but learning better ways of marketing, talking with people and engaging my clients. Learning more of the soft skills for being a founder.

Again I am taking a course on Social Media Marketing. At the same time, I need to learn video editing, writing and well the list goes on.