Launch day jitters

I’m launching Lists Kit today. And I’m nervous.

It never gets easier, does it? Even after so many launches, every launch still feels like the first. The uncertainty, the what-ifs:

What if no one likes it?
What if people like it but no one buys it?
What if it flops, like my last launch?
What if I’m wrong about this idea?

But a few things that I do know that I keep replaying in my head, to manage my own expectations:

• It’s not a mass market, B2C product. It’s more B2P, as in prosumers. So the target is narrower right from the get go. I can’t expect it to be universally favoured.
• It’s very niche (for info directories), so not everyone will need it.
• It’s very subjective and dependent on personal taste (in terms of tech stack and development experience), so not everyone will like it even if they need an info directory.
• I’m customer zero. This really started because I needed this boilerplate for myself. So I built it for my own needs. It’s already useful. And I’m going to use this to build more directories which will showcase Lists Kit better, so even if the launch falls flat, there’s still opportunity later on.
• Maybe there’s a very small % of people out there who are like me and want this, but they might not be on Twitter or part of my audience. Tbh, if the beta phase was anything, it’s definitely showed me that many in my audience are experienced devs who probably don’t have issues having to manage dependency hell and security updates. But everyone’s super nice in supporting me as an indie hacker for sure!
• My last product Sheet2Bio flopped at launch (I launched it only on Twitter to my audience). I think there’s still some negative emotional baggage there, but I also learned the important lesson that I was mistaken about it’s potential, just because it failed on Twitter. If there are established competitors selling similar products, there’s already a market and a demand for the product. I just have to carve out my slice of the SEO pie to move up in page rank. Trying to validate it using the usual scrappy indie hacker methods might prove counter-productive. Sheet2Bio had lots of link-in-bio predecessors already, so I should have just continued building and marketing even after launch failure. Likewise, for Lists Kit. HTML boilerplates are ubiquitous – on Envato’s Themeforest, there’s 19k HTML templates, with highest sellers more than 100k sales, and info directories with >600 sales. So no matter what happens today, keep going!
• A Twitter launch or even on Product Hunt is just one step out of the millions of steps in the long game of finding product-market fit and eventually profitability. I shouldn’t worry too much about whether the launch today does well or not. In the larger scheme of things, it’s just a drop in the ocean. The more important work is finding repeatable, sustainable and scalable distribution channels that gives positive ROI is more important (and Twitter/PH definitely isn’t repeatable, sustainable or scalable). I still got lots to do to grow it, especially in SEO and backlinks and via communities.

I feel so much better now writing this down and thinking it through!

But like how @drodol said before: “None of my fears have ever come true. In fact, the opposite is true. Reality has surpassed my wildest dreams at times.” Even while I’m making it seem overly negative, none of it might come true.

No matter what happens, it’ll be worth the effort to do the launch. Enjoy the spotlight for a bit, then get back to work.

Long game, onwards.