We Failed Launching IronMic

We were featured on Product Hunt and IndieHackers, but we didn’t go after the right coverage

When launching any startups, software, or sass these days you turn to Product Hunt and IndieHackers to announce your product is live. We nailed the Product Hunt part, but we failed to attract the right customers. On Product Hunt and IndieHackers, it’s a community of developers and makers. It’s not a place to acquire new and loyal customers when your sass product is focused on consumers. While IronMic does cater to the maker community on Product Hunt.  Those makers who create podcasts and need websites for those said podcasts are folks who are developers and technical users. They are less inclined to want to use an automated podcasting website.

The maker community gave us a ton of feedback, and we did acquire a few customers from the launch, we have struggled since. We have had trouble getting users to sign up and subscribe to the yearly and monthly plans. We are running ads, which are effective but we are spending more than the annual plan to get a user to signup. We have come to realize we missed big opportunities when we launched. The first and biggest are:

Press Coverage 📰

Having a blog or industry outlet cover your product is a huge boost. This isn’t an easy hurdle. You have to email hundreds of bloggers and journalists, pitching your company and product/service to them. We didn’t do this out of the gate. We took a different approach. Instead of press, we looked at tweeting anyone who had a podcast but didn’t have a website. This was effective in some cases but often came off in a negative way too many of the podcasters.

Now, we are focusing on industry outlets, and blogs focused on being resources for podcasters.

Review Sites 📚

Review sites go into the same bucket as press coverage, but they’re a slightly different beast. Almost every vertical on the internet has an industry of review sites. This means children’s toys, gadgets, podcast hosting, and product management systems all have sites dedicated to reviewing each respective service and product.

We are now reaching out to these reviewers and review-focused sites to get our site first review but also listed on their directories for the podcast hosting and podcast websites. These reviews will help people see and understand the industry loves and supports our service, giving us social validation.

Product Updates 📈

A lot of makers launch a product and push hard in the first few weeks; then they don’t keep pushing. They don’t make big splashes with small incremental updates. If you roll out a new feature, make a big deal out of it. A big update can merit another launch on Product Hunt.

We are now shipping updates weekly and writing blog posts on each update. Then, we will repackage these updates into monthly newsletters to paying customers and customers who signup but didn’t subscribe. This method allows us to get signups to possibly start paying. They may have given our service a try and found something missing, and the updates may finally push them over the edge.

Conclusion 🔑

We are now converting more people to subscribe with the updates, press coverage, and reviews from industry sites. We are still running ads, but they are hyper-focused on getting signups, even if those people don’t covert to pay. We have their information and we know they have a podcast, making them an easy target to market to.

When we launch IronMic 2.0, we will follow the traditional path of Product Hunt and IndieHackers. We will also do press releases, give early access to bloggers, and have a roadmap of updates ready to roll out.

If you have a podcast and need an automated and simple podcast website, be sure to check out IronMic at www.ironmic.fm! Tweet Me, and I can get you a coupon code for the service!