Ask HN: Our launch is trending on Product Hunt – now what?

Well, for one you could try to get on HN to keep the buzz moving. Oh, wait, I see what you did there.

Short answer: Everything.

Longer answer: you keep building something people need. You spend 100% of your time either acquiring users, talking to users, or building what users need.

You set one metric for the company and work towards that. As an early company, that is usually users. Then it is revenue.

That's really all there is.

If being on product hunt gets you users, that's awesome. If not, it's a waste of time.

If being on HN gets you users or feedback from potential users, that's awesome. Otherwise, it is a waste of time. (I'm going to download this and see if I can spin something up for https://romuluscrm.com, so you got at least 1!)

1) Build something people want. 2) Get it into the hands of those people. 3) Charge them money in proportion to the value you're providing. ... 879412309) IPO

Nothing you'll do now matters for the future of your product, not even your appearance on product hunt (which barely is read by your target audience anyway), so just continue with what you were doing before.

congrats. But traffic from product hunt (et al) and news articles, etc is always temporary. So here in a bit it's going to die down, no matter what you do. You may or may NOT get users from it, and there's nothing you can do about that--a lot of times on these types of sites, people are just curious and move on to the next thing tomorrow.

Just remember that, and don't let it discourage you. Keep doing what you're doing and stick to your plan.

Also, product hunt, hn, news articles are not a substitute for a marketing plan. So if you haven't thought about how you're going to get users without them, it's a good time to start thinking about it. Traffic from PH, HN, news, etc should be thought of as a bonus--a nice thing to have.. your startup should not depend on it at all. (Edit: to expand on this.. traffic like PH is semi-random. While marketing is a process. You can't depend on semi-random events. But you can execute and refine a process.)

Since you are getting plenty of traffic - will getting more feedback help ? If so, can you make giving feedback easily accessible at home page ? So what should be a good question be ? eg:question we are better than say a competitor (fill the name?) because ?

If gaining more users is what you want - will adding a forkme at github help ?

If gaining more traction : add social buttons to spread the word about page ?

I saw this couple of days ago and was wondering how flexible this framework is? Will you be providing source code?

Continue working on your product.

Capture as many email addresses as you can and start a list so that you can continue to reach out to those that showed initial interest as you build the business.

You won't keep the momentum. Think of it as a burst of leads, similar to having a booth at a trade show.

Write a follow up blog post

Stream about it on Facebook live and retain as many genuine users you pick up as possible.

Throwing up some surveys while you have enough traffic to make them feasible is a good idea, too.

(As others have pointed out, improving the product is still #1, but it doesn't look like you were looking for advice about that side of things in this post)