March 19th, 2018 | MultiNewTab
After my first side project, MMA matchups flopped, I felt a little disappointed. So to feel better, I decided to take on a freelance job. I made a website for a dental company and used again Rails and Heroku, no React this time! It took 20 days, so by the time I wrapped it up, it was February 1st. On the 7th, I would be traveling to see my friends in the city I studied in, so I had to build something really scrappy and stupid. Max time I gave to myself, 4 days and then promote it ASAP. So I built something to scratch my own itch. I love New Tab chrome extensions, but you can only use one at each time. The only way to use another one, is to go to chrome://extensions and disable the current New Tab chrome extension you are using and enable the new one you want to use. EVERY SINGLE TIME. I searched if there was anything that allows you to use multiple New Tab chrome extensions at the same time in the past, because I wanted to use it for myself, but found nothing. Searched one last time, nothing. That was simple enough! I learned how to make chrome extensions and built the MVP in 4 days. Constraints are the best productivity hack, I bet if I had two weeks ahead of me, it would magically take about two weeks to finish! For my domain, I switched to namecheap from GoDaddy and bought the cheapest domain possible. multinewtabextension.tech, 2.5 dollars. Then I launched something on Product Hunt for the first time. I posted at 00:02 San Fransisco time and I was on the bottom of the second page from the start. I left it in peace. The first day on Product Hunt I got 2 upvotes, one of them being from me and the other from some other soul! Haha I was super disappointed. But for some reason, I don’t know why and how PH works exactly but my post was left the whole of the next day in the Today section also. I suspect it had to do with the fact that the algorithm didn't give my product even half a chance to stand out, having been stuck at the bottom of the second page all day. I got 46 upvotes and 2 downloads. 2 downloads?! WTF. At least it is something that I will actually use though every day, so what the hell I don't really care if other people find it useful to be honest. Anyway fast forward one week I am with my friend and I check the downloads again just for a laugh, and to my surprise MultiNewTab had 75 users! The chrome store hadn’t updated the downloads the day of the launch, so that's why I had seen only 2. I also had a few mentions about MultiNewTab on Twitter so that felt great. Not anything crazy, I didn't have to Google "how to handle fame" or anything but still the 3 or 4 mentions felt good! Now back to the drawing board, off to ship something simple and ship fast again, the faster and scrappier I go, the better the results so far. What I learned from MultiNewTab: 1) Product Hunt is a great way to promote your tech product. No full blown campaigns, no finding hunters, no nothing and it did it’s job, I showed my work to the world. 2) The scrappier and faster I go, the better the results, so…. keep being scrappy. 3) Validated my assumption that domain names mean shit when it comes to validating. Total cost of MMA matchups: 50 euros, total cost of MultiNewTab: 2 euros.
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