The Journey and Lessons Learned from Launching My Personal Development Service 'Moyuk' on Product Hunt

Last month, I launched my personal development service Moyuk on Product Hunt, so I would like to write about the process from development to launch and the lessons I learned.

About Me

I work at a medical startup building electronic medical records and receipt computers while also doing personal development.

• @kohii00 on Twitter

• kohii on GitHub

What I Built

I wrote a detailed introduction to the service here, so please take a look 🙏

Technical details can be found here:

The Path from Starting Development to Launch

1. Deciding to Build (December 2021)

I decided to start personal development. I had always wanted to create and grow my own product, and hopefully, make a living from it. I had a stock of various ideas from the past, and from those, I chose one that I could be a user of and that I found interesting. It was completely idea-driven, but since it was a personal project, I figured that was fine.

2. Organizing the Concept (December 2021)

I organized the concept. I wrote something like this as a user statement.

I also created UI images in Figma and had a few friends bounce ideas around with me.

I also conducted competitor research and investigated technical feasibility.

3. Starting Development (January 2022)

To secure time, I switched to working three days a week at my company. (There are other employees at my company who work flexibly. It's a good company.)

From here on, I continued development for over a year, even though I felt like giving up many times along the way.

I will skip the details, but I started by building the core parts with high uncertainty, and postponed backend tasks like data handling and authentication, along with technical selection, until later.

4. Infrastructure Setup (December 2022)

Since I had something that worked, I prepared an actual environment and deployed it for the time being.

Thanks to amazing services like Vercel, Supabase, and Cloudflare, it was completed in about a day. Since I didn't have any users yet, the free tier was sufficient. (In fact, I am still able to run it on the free tier.)

5. Getting People to Use It (February 2023)

While building the missing features, it reached a state where I could show it to others, so I had people close to me use it and provide feedback. Based on that, I fixed the minimum necessary parts. I was able to confirm that there were no usability issues, as everyone who used it was able to master it without any explanation.

However, including myself, there weren't many scenes where I would normally use Moyuk, and although I had a vague suspicion, I felt that at this stage, I might not be solving a "compelling pain" yet.

But once I got this far, I just wanted to release it. I decided to just go for it, thinking it's a personal project anyway.

6. Creating the LP, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy (February 2023)

First, I made a makeshift landing page. I created the content in Notion, built a form to collect email addresses using Notion Form, and published it with a custom domain. Since it is a service deployed globally, all content is in English.

While creating the LP for the official release, I also created the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. There are several services that generate Terms of Service and Privacy Policies, so I mixed their results, referred to existing similar services, and cobbled them together.

I also tried hard to write the description regarding GDPR, but it was too difficult. I judged that it would take too much time to fully comply with GDPR when I didn't even know if it would be a hit yet, so I added a description like "Please do not use this if you live in a region affected by GDPR." GDPR is a killer for personal developers...

7. Marketing-related Things (February–March 2023)

(Although I knew it,) I was stunned by my lack of influence. I had never really wanted to increase my followers on social media, and due to my personality, I had a psychological hurdle about exposing my statements and actions to the public, so that was just how it was.

Influence/ability to disseminate information is not something that can be acquired overnight, and I regretted that I should have thought about how to overcome this weakness sooner.

8. Preparation for Launch on Product Hunt (Late March to Early April 2023)

Product Hunt is a product posting site where daily rankings are created through voting. I had been watching Product Hunt long before I made Moyuk, and I wanted to submit my own product someday.

8.1. Scheduling the Post to Product Hunt

The guide provided by the official site was used as a reference to prepare the content. Since the content needs to be written in English, I used DeepL and ChatGPT to refine it, and finally had a native speaker check it.

The content I actually created is here.

Since you can schedule posts to Product Hunt in advance, I set a date and time so that it would be posted exactly at the start of the race (16:01 JST). In terms of traffic, Tuesday through Friday are good, and if you want to get a good ranking, it seems weekends are better because there is less competition. I chose a mediocre Monday for the Moyuk launch.

Also, there are things you should do once you have scheduled your post.

Add a Badge to your LP
As a flow from your LP to the Product Hunt launch page, place a badge like the one below in a prominent spot on your LP. PH provides the code for embedding, so you just need to paste it.

Create a Teaser
After scheduling your post on Product Hunt, you can create a Teaser (a sneak peek or announcement of the launch), so I did that just in case. Teasers are listed under Coming soon.

8.2. Write articles

To increase traffic to the product launch page, I prepared product introduction articles and released them at the same time as the launch.

• Technical articles:

  • Japanese version → to Zenn

  • English version → to Medium

• Product introduction articles:

  • Japanese version → to note

  • English version → to dev.to

8.3. Preparation for posting to Made with Supabase

Made with Supabase is a site that introduces services built using the technology called Supabase. Since Moyuk uses Supabase internally, I arranged for it to be posted around the same time as the Product Hunt launch. (Usually, it takes about a week to be posted, but you can control the posting date by contacting the people in charge.)

9. Launch Day (April 10, 2023)

Since it was automatically posted to Product Hunt at 16:01, I shared it on Twitter and various other SNS. At the same time, I released the articles I had prepared on Zenn, note, etc. The article I wrote on Zenn reached the top of the Trends and got a decent amount of traffic. The article I wrote in English didn't reach anyone because I don't have any connections in the English-speaking world 😂 Also, when the product was posted on Made with Supabase, their official account tweeted about it, so I retweeted it.

After that, I replied to comments on Product Hunt and kept an eye on the ranking. I received 7 organic comments, which made me very happy, so I decided that I would also comment when I find good products.

The final ranking was 18th place.

Reflections and Lessons

Looking back on the project, there are several reflections and lessons learned.

Start small

In product development, you must always face the risk of building the wrong thing. If you are developing individually, it is fine to build what you want based on an idea, but in that case, I think it is better to keep the scope as small as possible and get feedback from the world as early as possible. For example, in the case of Moyuk, I should have omitted authentication, authorization, and app management functions, and just built the core part—create an App → share via URL—and released it to the world.

Influence and ability to disseminate information are important after all

Just as important as the appeal of the product itself is ensuring it reaches many people's eyes, which requires the ability to communicate and having connections.

I feel that acting solely with the goal of increasing followers is wrong, but I have decided that when I build something next, I will properly engage in initiatives like 'Build in public.' In addition to promoting the product, it is also important that you can gauge to some extent how much traction the service or idea has during the development process.

Human estimation skills are unreliable.

Initially, I planned to release it in about 10 months even if it dragged on, but in reality, it took about 1.5 times that long. Based on my experience so far, I would like to propose a law like this.

• People underestimate what they want to build and overestimate what they don't want to do.

• Plans longer than three months will almost always be delayed.

Beware of the misuse of 'Focus and Prioritization'.

For over a year, I put everything other than development on the back burner. Reading, hobbies, starting new things, meeting people, etc...

I believed that one should finish the most important or essential tasks first, and only after those are done should one move on to the next. I thought this was the spirit of 'Agile,' 'Essentialism,' and 'Getting Things Done.' However, I think this way of thinking only holds true if you first break down tasks into appropriate granularities and determine priorities from a bird's-eye view. Neglecting this is not 'focus and prioritization,' but rather a suspension of thought.

Future Outlook

I would like to improve Moyuk little by little. While I worry that the value of Moyuk might relatively decrease given the recent excitement around Generative AI, Moyuk has high utility, so I have some hope that there might be some potential buried within it, and I intend to keep working on it steadily.
Also, besides Moyuk, I want to continue creating things that I find interesting.

Thank you for reading until the end. Please feel free to try out Moyuk if you'd like.