He submitted and hunted the product himself on Product Hunt, having prepped images, a promo video, a written description, and a first comment in advance.

“It was a close call, but I got into the top 3 and stayed there for the rest of the day.”

He posted the Show HN submission from a park bench in Amsterdam with a friend, the day after his Product Hunt launch.

“When launching on Hacker News (from a bench in Amsterdam with Joshua Voydik ) it really striked a chord.”

The post caught on almost instantly, hitting #1 within minutes and holding the spot for hours.

“We reached the #1 spot within the first 5 minutes for at least 9 hours.”

He deliberately budgeted roughly half his time for marketing and built an internal dashboard tracking Twitter mentions and target SEO keywords so he could reply to relevant tweets by hand.

“This time, I set my goal of programming vs marketing to 50/50.”

Manually responding to mentions helped him get his own name and the product out there.

“The strategy was to respond to the tweets, manually, that appears on Twitter which would also help me in getting my name out there.”

He invested heavily in writing thorough product documentation.

“I put a lot of time and effort in writing our documentation”

The docs pages became a steady, ongoing source of new sign-up referrals.

“I see a lot of referrers from our docs when people sign up.”

He let customers make their own analytics dashboards public and shareable.

“Public dashboards also turned out to be a great marketing feature.”

Customers shared their public dashboards, which simultaneously promoted Simple Analytics itself.

“There are plenty tweets out there sharing their dashboard and at the same time they are sharing Simple Analytics.”