Joe Schmoe is an illustrated avatar collection that Jess and I created. We decided to start this project because I always had trouble finding avatars I liked for web projects I was working on and Jess wanted an excuse to do more illustrations. It was a small side project that we don’t expect to monetise and we’ll continue to iterate on it for the sake of fun, hoping to learn some things on the way.

One of our bigger areas of learning was around how to launch. Now that we’ve built this thing we like, how do we get other people to use it?

We knew we eventually wanted to do a big launch on Product Hunt, but weren’t sure how or when. So after working on it for a little over a month, we started doing some tests here and there on some subreddits in mid February. One of these subreddits, r/SideProject, got more traction than expected, keeping Joe Schmoe on the front page for a whole day. This brought a fair amount of traffic and also led to people sharing on other platforms, including Product Hunt.

We had lost our opportunity to plan the perfect launch on Product Hunt. But it still went well.

Reading about how to launch on Product Hunt can be overwhelming, especially for smaller projects like ours, so I wanted to share our experience in not doing most of the things people recommended and still having a somewhat successful launch. So here’s a summary of my own recommendations for anyone looking to get their fun side projects into the world.

Prepare

Even if you are not preparing a perfect launch for the next big thing you’ll want to follow a few simple steps to prepare your website so you know if you are getting any traffic, where it is coming from, etc.

Add Google Analytics. Append “?ref=<website>” to your url when sharing. Some websites do it automatically, but some don’t. Adding this to your url will make it easier to know where the traffic is coming from. So for example, when sharing Joe Schmoe on r/SideProject, the url should be https://www.joeschmoe.io/?ref=rsideproject. For the more technical folks, if you want to dig deeper in traffic, I’d recommend setting up better logging. We setup keen.io, it’s been very easy to use. Setup social sharing tags. This one makes previews of your website look nicer when shared on social media, allowing you to set a title, description and image that will be shown. You can use something like https://metatags.io/ to have them automatically generated.

And that’s it! Each step should not take too much time, even if you are not technical (I’ll be happy to help if you ask me on twitter or email).

Find your community

Now that you are ready to share, you actually need to share. This is easier said than done for a few reason.

First thing is, showing off your work is not easy for everyone. Jess literally had a panic attack because things didn’t look exactly the way she wanted, and as the designer, she didn’t want to be judged. I was also nervous about not getting any likes/shares and people not caring.

The second one is actually knowing who to share with.

You might think your project will be interesting for a specific group of people, but ends up better for another group. I wanted to build Joe Schmoe for engineers because as an engineer myself, my problem was to find cute avatars to use in my projects. It ended up being more picked up by design communities. A designer shared the project on Product Hunt and most of our traffic came from being shared by other design-related websites and newsletters.

We tried a few subreddits that were too small to have any impact, HN didn’t work out either, then r/SideProject worked. One subreddit and it all went from there.

So all you need is

Don’t be scared. It’s going to be ok (we only had positive or nice constructive feedback)

Find a few interested communities. Not too small or it won’t have much impact, not too big or being noticed will be too hard/random.

See the traffic go!

Give ways to follow up

One thing that blew my mind was to see how people visiting Joe Schmoe followed other links.

Very hidden at the bottom of the page, in the footer, is a link to our studio’s website, jonandjess.studio. I wasn’t expecting anyone to even scroll so far down, but people did! We’ve seen about 5% of traffic following this link. And some people even used our contact form to give feedback or request more Schmoes. It’s incredibly exciting and magical!

We didn’t add a newsletter signup at first because we didn’t even know what to offer or what to do, but it seems like people just want to hear when more Schmoes or features will be added. So we ended up adding the newsletter signup later on and still get people to signup today. I wish we had added it earlier.

We really want Joe Schmoe to be about Joe Schmoe, so we are not pushing any conversion tricks to get people to signup or follow our website — doing so would get us more signups, but we want to keep it simple and a good experience without popups and such.

Conclusion

Launching something is part science, part art.

The science is straight forward, but like with anything else, you can dive deep into it and always do more.

The art part is even trickier. You will never know what works and what doesn’t until you launch. There is also a big luck factor determining if you’ll get picked up or not. We went 1st on r/SideProject and 7th on PH — this could have gone differently on another day or time.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Don’t reach for perfect when launching your project. Do the bare minimum that feel comfortable sharing, and then just share with the world.

You can always launch again a bit later 😻

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