I launched my product in 7 days — Here is what I learned

Three weeks ago I challenged myself.

I decided to release my first product in a week (yes, crazy) to motivate myself to further action.

A week has passed since my digital product was released, and today I would like to share with you the lessons I learned.

Assumptions

I didn’t have much time so the product had to be simple.

In fact, the whole challenge was about learning the process of creating (but more importantly) PUBLISHING a product.

I decided to share the private template that I use when planning my new products/projects.

So I had the product ready, I just had to tweak it a little — I added things like help questions, a ToDo list, and simple marketing strategies to start.

I wrote down a weekly promotion plan — where and what I am going to post.

Let me just say that I have no audience at all. So I went where the audience was, and exposure was relatively easy — Twitter, Medium, and Indie Hackers.

I started taking action.

What went wrong

Misconceptions

I knew a lot about email marketing, building a sales website, etc.

But I knew all this from theory…

Despite the articles I read and the videos I watched, when I started doing it in practice, I felt like a lost child.

You won’t learn until you do.

Lesson:
Start testing a lot of things, this is the quickest and best way to learn.

Write down everything you do so that you can later turn it into a process.

Badly estimated tasks

As I mentioned, I did most of the things for the first time.

Setting up the sales page, e-mail sequences, and promotional graphics.
I had a wrong time estimate for these tasks, so I had to do some things late (or over the weekend).

Lesson:
At the beginning, give yourself more time to do tasks that you haven’t done before.

Extend time x2.

Too little promotion

I think I should put more into the promotion.

But not a direct sale of the product, just more valuable posts that direct to product.

Additionally, more Build in Public. In the course of working on the product, I only used Twitter 3 days out of 7.

Pro:
I was able to focus on publishing the product.
Con:
Too little buzz around the product.
I had little influence on the rest because of the small audience.

Lesson:
Promotion is just as important as product creation.
If not more important.

If you focus on audience building at the beginning, it will be much easier for you to publish your product.

If you don’t have an audience, use existing communities — go where your customers are.

Not enough time for the first product

The last and most important point.

I wanted to challenge myself, that’s why I did it, but still, a week to prepare and publish the first product is not enough.

The amount of tasks, processes, and details you have to deal with has overwhelmed me.

I didn’t realize how much it could be — and it was a simple template!

Lesson:
Give yourself more time.
You will be able to focus more and refine your product.

What went well

Learned a lot about the process

As I mentioned before — learning the publishing process was very important to me.

I kept writing down the steps I was taking and adding new ideas for the future.

Thanks to this, the process of my next attempts (and there will be many of them!) will be better and better.

Lesson:
Track everything. Write down conclusions. Improve the process.

I did it!

Finally, the most important thing.

Before I spent too much time thinking and planning, so I didn’t do anything.
I felt bad about it and wanted to change it — hence the idea of ​​forcing myself to this challenge.

But in the end, I’m happy I did.

Lesson:
Experiment. Test. Do a lot of different things. Do whatever. Start with very little things — it will give you momentum.

It really feels great — especially watching people download your product.

Results

Views: 14
Downloads: 3

These are the statistics.

Nothing amazing but I’m glad whoever downloaded it anyway.

I’m not going to stop.

Thanks, see you soon