From idea to #2 on Product Hunt in one week
Last week Thomas Vimare, Ariel Dorol, and I launched Foreignrap. This is how…
Almost all my designer friends have launched a product. Marty shipped Poolside.fm and Tens. Davey made IconJar and Oykun is updating MinimalStuff on a daily basis. Big or small, seeing them doing this is so inspiring. That’s why for the last two years I wanted to launch something as well.
See, I f*cking love music. Inspired by Tobias van Schneider, I used to publish some of my own mixtapes on SoundCloud. They were getting some attention here, but I wasn’t happy with it. I wanted to create a different experience around these tapes. Maybe I should create a website? But how would that be different than listening to them on SoundCloud or adding them to designers.mx?
Whatever I came up with was boring and I just stopped trying 😞.
A tweet…
Still I wanted to create something, but what 🤔? Suddenly I saw the following tweet from Thomas…
Thomas and I were following each other on Twitter for a long time but so far we never spoke to each other. After his tweet, I had to DM him because this French song was so damn good. From there on we started sharing some rap videos with each other. I was sending him Scandinavian/Dutch songs while he kept sharing more of that French stuff.
My inbox got so full that I started asking myself if it deserved its own place.
I’m not a webmaster.
I wrote Thomas that we should find a way to share these songs with the rest of the world, but I wasn’t sure how. His idea was that whatever we would do, it should include the music videos since they’re awesome.
Whatever we’re going to build, I want it to have that ‘live tv’ experience.
I’m not a web designer, but I was so hyped about the idea that for a day I felt like I was the best web designer in the world. I spent some hours on a Saturday in Figma and created a very quick draft of the website.
I’m an 80’s kid so I grew up with music channels like MTV. Whatever we’re going to build, I want it to have that ‘live tv’ experience. It should be a website that shuffles through music videos. A website where you’re able to skip the songs that you don’t like and submit songs that you think are missing.
I shared the first design drafts with Thomas, he loved it and shared it with his developer friend Ariel. After a few days, I received the first working prototype, without any CSS on top of it. It looked amazing, so I created a Slack team (only then it started to become official) and started to search for more songs.
Adding content though…
Finding songs is easy. We already had a few, but I wanted to cover more countries. I looked on Reddit, searched on YouTube and browsed through music blogs. That’s all fun until you need to add them to the website.
Next to having a minimal design, I found it very important to provide the URLs of the songs from music services. I can say that doing this for 250+ songs is not that much fun. It took longer to compile all songs, than design & develop the website…
Should we release it?
I’ve been sharing the unfinished version with some friends and they enjoyed it! The website was not 100% done, the mobile experience sucked, but does that matter? Should we wait a bit longer and make it perfect?
I mean they all loved it, so f* it, let’s release it. We’ll fix these issues later. Murat (he made Marvel) helped us posting it on Product Hunt.
That ‘Launch Day’ feeling!
Four years ago I made a project, featured by top tech websites, called ‘Rebranding Samsung’. Seeing your work getting shared and liked by so many people is a (positively) weird feeling.
And it happened again, this time with Foreignrap. We got around 500 upvotes on Product Hunt and ended #2 (if only Shopify didn’t release a product that day). We got featured on sites like The Next Web & VICE. My Twitter notifications were almost like when Nicki Minaj joined Snapchat. And we were seeing some pretty cool numbers on Google Analytics.
I don’t have a secret formula to have a successful launch, but it’s the mix of simplicity, content and branding.
Did the launch go smooth?
Almost… We were using Typeform for music submissions. On launch day, we found out that the free tier only accepts 100 inputs. We received around 250 in an hour. We fixed it by replacing it with Google Forms.
What’s next?
First, we have to add more music videos to the website. Right now we are going through all of the submissions and whenever we add a song, you will get pinged on Twitter.
Second, we are working on some features that are still missing. Think of: being able to share a track, adding Chromecast support, selecting individual countries, adding volume control and making the website a bit more social.
After that, I don’t know 🤷♂️. We are still figuring out how we can keep this website relevant. Right now I’m hoping that more music blogs will feature us…
Please let us know if you have some tips.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, then I’d appreciate if you could recommend it. Hit me up on Twitter or something…
