One month ago I launched for the first time on Producthunt. For my surprise, it ended up in the third position of the day with a total of 487 upvotes. Tuemilio started as a simple HTML email collector that I need it for validating my MVPs.

At the time I only knew Mailchimp for collecting emails. I wasn't satisfied with how it integrated with my landings. I didn't want users to verify their emails. An extra step would drop the total numbers of emails I could collect. Now that I've been working on Tuemilio for a while is when I found out there is a lot of competitors around this idea. 

One lesson learned here is: do more research before working on something. Search on the internet, Quora, Reddit. Look for alternatives in sites like Capterra or Producthunt. Ask the community like IH, Telegram groups, HN, etc. Having competitors isn't bad, check what they offer so you can find a need that isn't covered yet. 

Trying to differentiate it from similar products I decided to add a viral engine to it. If Tuemilio doesn't succeed, at least I can use it myself for my next ideas for free. But I found out that inside the viral engines category, there are endless competitors too. So my idea now is to market it to developers and startups. I want to offer them a toolset such as a back-end, a JavaScript library and a dashboard with metrics. It's an MVP validator powerhouse.

Launch

I launched on a Monday. Its success surprised me quite a lot. I had really low expectations. I guess that a big part of it was due to the GIF I used on the thumbnail. It took me around 3 hours to make it on Photoshop. When I was doing it I was thinking: why am I doing this? Nobody is going to see this, but I was wrong! Maybe the idea also resonated with other makers, who knows. 

Stats

One month after, it brought me a total of 1.003 unique visitors without counting references from other pages. 141 registered users, 120 campaigns created and 2.500 emails collected. From that, 4 users subscribed to the pro plan. For the last week, the numbers look like a desert. After the launch peak, there is an average of 20 unique visitors on the landing. 

I found out a key problem on the user onboarding experience. I was seeing on my database that a big part of the registered users didn't create an email list. Without an email list, you can't get an HTML form and so my product is useless. I also read some user feedback saying that they couldn't figure out how to use the site or get the embedded code. 

It was a UI problem. After registering, there was a small button saying +add without any other instruction. I changed that for a big card form saying "Create your first list to get the form code". Now almost all new users create an email list.   

One of my users show me a few crypto sites using referral systems. Thanks to that, I found out that crypto relies a lot on creating buzz and network effects. They even have a word for that: airdrops. Airdrops are way more complex. They not only have a referral system, but they also track things like Twitter following, tweeting about the product, joining Telegram or Discord groups, etc. So far I've only seen a service doing this, so adding some features I could make Tuemilio interesting for the crypto community. 

Next steps

Even though I got some validation with paying users, I am struggling to grow my user base after the launch and find my niche. I have a few marketing strategies that I will show here in the following posts. But I can advance that my idea now is to launch a few MVPs using Tuemilio. That way I can keep validating new ideas and promote Tuemilio at the same time.

If you make it so far, thanks! And if you have any suggestion on how I can market this, please let me know on Twitter @manceraio.