Day 60: Hide Feed Launch (pt. 2)

I launched Hide Feed on Hacker News two weeks ago (wow, I can’t believe it’s already been that long), and today, I finally posted it to Product Hunt.

Spamming Everyone I Know

I waited until 3AM for Hide Feed to go live on Product Hunt (products go live at 12AM PST which is 3AM here in New York) and then stayed up until 4:30AM or so messaging everyone I know to check it out. I kept waking up throughout the night (too excited, I guess) so I only got a few hours of sleep last night. As a result of my schedule and sleep being super whack, this day has been a weird blur.

This is probably the hardest I tried to deliberately direct attention to something (expand bullets to see screenshots):

• I posted an update on my personal mailing list for the first time in over half a year (415 people)

I posted on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/dk_the_human/status/1235480701966987265) (I don't know how many followers I have (thanks [Hide Likes](https://www.hidelikes.com/)!) and I'd rather not know)

I posted on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/dk/posts/10221858184027855) (I have \~2000 friends? I don't know)

I messaged friends who I've been talking to recently (\~15 people?)

I emailed all the beta testers of Hide Feed who signed up via email (29 people)

I posted to the #launch channel of my Hacker Fellowship group (29 people)

The Result

~90 votes over the course of the day, which had me alternating between the 10th and 11th position in today’s list of products. Product Hunt is weird because sometimes it shows the top 10 products of the day but other times it shows up to 13 so I don’t know what’s going on there.

I checked the analytics for hidefeed.com throughout the day and the number of active users at any time was around 4 at max and usually 1 or 2. Both Google Analytics and the Chrome Web Store show data after the whole day has passed, so I’ll share in tomorrow’s post how many visitors I received and how many people installed it.

My guess: ~1000 visitors and ~100 installations.

Reflections

• I have amazing friends

  • Super thankful to have people in my life who are receptive to my spam and are happy to support me by upvoting/commenting on my stuff

    • Thank you!!!! I am very, very grateful.

• Getting upvotes is really, really hard

  • Messaging friends directly definitely feels like the most effective way to get support on a post, but I feel uneasy doing it. Unless we’ve already been talking about our projects or are quite close friends, I don’t feel comfortable messaging people out of the blue asking them to check out my projects. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel comfortable doing this.
  • There’s definitely a market for buying upvotes, and I’m curious how many people use them

• GIVING UP SLEEP IS NEVER WORTH IT

  • future dk please remember this

• Checking my stats constantly throughout the day is not helpful nor healthy

  • My ideal launch day:

    • Make a post
    • Live my life normally without checking progress
    • Check how it did at the end of the day / the following day

• Meditation is super helpful

  • During my sleepless night, I felt the grasping around wanting the post to do well. When I meditated in the morning, I was able to let that go and accept that things will happen however they happen. Once I recognized that, everything felt much lighter and I stopped being to attached to how my post did.

There was another realization I had today that was uncomfortable to accept but it’s pretty obvious now: Intention is way more promising than Hide Feed.

Over the last several days, I’ve had friends messaging me about how helpful they’ve found Intention. The problem that most people want to solve with Hide Feed is to spend less time wasting time. Hide Feed does that decently by providing a barrier to accessing feeds, but Intention is much more effective at that. I’ve found that (1) committing to a time period before browsing and (2) being kicked out when that time period ends works extremely well. In contrast, Hide Feed doesn’t stop you from browsing endlessly once you reveal a feed.

I’m still processing this (it’s difficult to accept because (1) I initially stopped working on Intention to work on Hide Feed and (2) I spent so much time building Hide Feed), but this means I need to make some changes.

Here are some of the directions I’m considering:

• Hide Feed can absorb Hide Likes, Hide Notifications (an extension I built for myself that hides notifications that I haven’t released publicly) and become the extension to hide anything on any page

  • It would be less about stopping you from wasting time and more about customizing websites
  • Or maybe I should just leave it alone?

• Intention will become the main project for stopping you from wasting time, and my top priority would become building Intention on mobile