Reflecting on our Product Hunt Launch

This past week has been incredible. We're finally seeing signs of traction after weeks of building. This blog post is dedicated to our launch experience on Product Hunt. Or, how we ended up with over 100 downloads, got featured on the front page as the #10 Product of the Day, and were upvoted by the likes of Ryan Hoover, Chris Messina, and Hiten Shah.

In the spirit of transparency and open startups, I'll be explicit with details to give you, the reader, sufficient context to our story. If this is your first time reading our blog, hi I'm Sarim 🤝 Enough with the pleasantries. Let's set the scene.

In short, Neat is productivity software. It brings your web notifications straight to your macOS menu bar so you can respond to anything in a keystroke or click. For now, we support GitHub notifications. In the longer term, our vision is to build the most seamless & simple web notification experience for all your web applications on your desktop.

macOS menu bar

Why? We think notifications are underrated and underutilized.

We want to give users a fine-grained notification experience where the user only receives notifications for what they truly care about.
We do this in a checklist-like experience so users can easily track their progress and manage their backlog.
Notifications in Neat are curated to user liking, clearly emphasize the action items, and offer keyboard shortcuts for practically everything for instant navigation and control.

Neat user interface accessible at ⌘G keyboard shortcut

Background

<aside> 🙏 If you're curious about how we got here, this section is for you. Otherwise, feel free to skip to the next section.

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Neat has been a work-in-progress for almost two years, mainly as a part-time project for the co-founding team as we finished our undergrad. The current iteration of Neat is our fourth product to date. Below you'll find snapshots of our journey in stunning 4K.

We started with hacking together a Notion-like documentation tool. It solved no problems, so we built a visual file manager and launched it to Product Hunt. It did well but users didn't stick. We then dabbled with the idea of an Alfred-like search tool until we eventually converged to the current version of Neat — a central feed for your web notifications on your desktop.

We're really excited about our current direction and have never felt a greater sense of purpose as we think this product has tremendous potential for positively impacting the daily workflows of the 1 billion knowledge workers worldwide.

Since May 2021, we've been full-time on Neat and have been building this current product since mid-June. In the past few weeks, we've built a functional prototype (or MVP), identified users who need it most, onboarded ~20 of them, retained 60% as Daily Active Users (DAUs), built a user-feedback loop, and shipped bi-weekly releases to iteratively improve the product.

This gallery below captures some of the memories made along the way. As I piece these together, I'm also taking the opportunity to reflect on where we started and the progress we've made. Truly grateful.

Huzaifa and Ted brainstorming (Jan 7, 2020)

Group brainstorm at McLennan Library, McGill University (Feb 11, 2020)

The team responding to COVID-19 and going fully remote (Jan 16, 2021)

Post-launch faces (Oct 18, 2021)

Nuel and Ted emulating what a "customer interaction" would look like on a phone call 😆 (Jan 8, 2020)

Kamal, Ted, and I living together - working hard or hardly working? (Aug 3, 2021)

Setting a clear goal

At this stage, we had proven to ourselves that at least one person needed our product and that users were deriving genuine value from the tool. Now we wanted to grow our user base to reach a sample size sufficient to guide the product roadmap.

Internally, we set a goal to get 100 downloads. 100 downloads, to us, was sufficient to measure retention (and churn) and to refine our understanding of the core value we offer to our users.