How I Made my first Online Dollar With a mistake on Product Hunt

You read it right, I am not exaggerating this shit, This happened.

5 min readJun 26, 2021

Ok, Let me explain how did this happen. If you are not aware of Product Hunt. (Read it Here)

I have been on the Product hunt for a long time and always seeing people create amazing products and not only create but also sell them.

Being in the design industry for a long time and having so much stuff which I created for fun and my practice, I started thinking about which I can sell as a product. I know this sounds a little greedy but all the amazing products were started with a simple thought.

So I started researching and made my first product:

Doodlicons — A carelessly designed Icon set.

This is where all that mishap happened, After creating Doodlicons, I submitted it to the Product hunt website, I wanted to see the requirements and what is needed for a good launch from the product hunt’s side.

It was nothing much, Product hunt needed only a few things ( Listed Below)

Product Cover or Covers
A link to product or Landing Page
Details of Maker

After submitting this, It gave me two buttons, First launching it right away or schedule it for the future. I didn’t want to schedule it but I also didn’t want to reenter all the stuff again, so I chose a future date and hit schedule ( You would think I am that smart to figure out which is schedule button but I am not) I pressed the wrong f*cking button. The product was launched

Product hunt gives you a 24 HR window to promote before it goes to the next day launch list. I knew I fucked up and I cant undo it (Why does our life not have a Ctrl + Z Button? Why God, Why?)

I was in a state of panic because I didn’t want my first product to fail. So I went online and started to search how can I make sure that my product launch is successful.

Here are some steps I took, You can try them in your Product launch too

(Just don’t fucking click a wrong button like me)

Communities
Communities are a great way to increase tractions and show your product to multiple people. I joined multiple communities in Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord and spammed them with my product, Now I won’t suggest spamming communities. I didn’t have any choice because of my mistake but you do so join these communities beforehand and interact with people before bombarding them with links.
Friends
I mean I don’t have many real-life friends(What is that pity look like?) But I have too many online friends. I blasted all of them with the links on Twitter and Whatsapp.
I also tagged Product makers and they are very helpful.

After doing all of this I remembered that while I am sharing the Product hunt link, my product link is a notion page, Which isn’t even ready for the launch (Remember launched by mistake) So the next step was creating a Landing Page, Being a No-code and a lazy guy, I made the whole landing page in Notion.

You can check the page here — landing page

After setting up the notion page I had to divert the users to somewhere where they can download my product( Duh!). I chose to give two options.

I used Gumroad to share a Zip file and Figma community to share the product with Figma users directly.

I kept the price zero in Gumroad to share this product with the community for free. I could have given the Zip file directly on the landing page but I chose Gumroad because of two possibilities

Getting Email data that can help me in future
A long hope that somebody might pay for my free product (I am optimistic)

And my optimism worked as someone paid for my product, I made $6 on my first product while it’s not a big amount, It’s still the first dollar I made online.

Here are the stats of Gumroad & Figma