How we're getting early users for Hellotime (plus: we got to HN front page)

Hello guys,

Context: we're building hellotime.io, a planning app for creative studios. We're self-funded. Having no paid budget right now means sharing our experience and talking about our product is the way to let others know about us. Also, Google didn't know we existed a few months ago. A new product, new brand, and new domain make everything quite challenging.

It happens that people tell us, "It's the product I was looking for." However, letting them know Hellotime exists is not easy.

Here's how we're doing so far:

• Everything started in June by teasing our network here on LinkedIn. The response was good. People love to try new stuff and are generally willing to help.

• Then, we posted simple product updates to keep the momentum.

• We invited most of our users on our waitlist in July.

• We stopped posting and started listening to our early users. We gathered precious feedback and realized some relevant gaps that were limiting product adoption. Also, we had our own ideas for new features. We just focused on improving the product for the rest of the year, with very few public updates.

• Speaking with our early users helped us better understand our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and the topics they were interested in. This gave us food for thought for our content marketing strategy.

• With the new year, we went back to product marketing. We released a lot of new features, a new name for our product (from Plann to Hellotime), and we posted regular product updates.

• In February, we published the Agile Study Playbook (hellotime.io/playbook). We did this because we noticed creative studios like us were really interested in finding a way to sell products that allowed them to create quality outputs at a fair price. Having spent years finding a way using Agile Contracts at Moze, we put all our lessons learned in there. The Agile Studio Playbook has been really appreciated, and a lot of people got in touch to know more.

In March, we launched Hellotime’s blog, where we'll share our lessons learned, sneak peeks about how we build our product, mistakes we've made (there are many of them!) and our point of view on running a creative studio. Our first article about building a side project as a creative studio got attention from HN (https://www.hellotime.io/blog/starting-a-side-project-as-a-creative-studio).

All of this is helping us onboard early users. This is important because they are not only helping us shape the product but also give feedback on things like pricing.

The road from an idea to a real product is long and hard. We know this, and we have a lot to learn.

We are so grateful for the people we are meeting and all the things we're learning.

PS: It seems like the analytics numbers related to the HN launch are quite underestimated. I can tell this from the discrepancy between the tracked events from Plausible Analytics tracked and the number of waitlist requests I got on Mailchimp.