My startup launch was a failure or was it?
phalox.be
phalox.be
It doesn't appear to have failed because, according to the post, you didn't define what 'success' looks like. If you don't have a goal to measure your success against then you can't really fail. That's not very helpful though.
If the point of the launch was to go from nice-project-that-might-get-customers-one-day to actual-real-product-that-has-customers then yes, it was a failure. That's OK though, because a failure is only an event that didn't meet the criteria of success. You can try again, hopefully with a more successful pitch or a different audience and maybe meet your success criteria. At the very least you now know of one thing that doesn't work.
However...
You're on HN again with a blog post that barely mentions the product. There's no link to it. There's no opening line that says "I launched Validat.r and this is what happened" or a closing paragraph all about the product for people who see this post but didn't see the original one. Honestly, if you're going to leave that sort of really obvious stuff out of your marketing posts, why bother?
Thank you very much for taking the time to provide me with honest feedback! You're indeed right and highlight some interesting shortcomings.
Allow me to reply to your remarks.
In the post, I indeed didn't define what success looked like and I'll be amending this. My initial goal was to get a first feel of the market and not necessarily customer conversions (that might not have come through very well). But I did want to strike a chord with the many entrepreneurs who have built a product, do the magic launch and then nothing happens.
I think that potential readers would most definitely be interested in this extra information, so thanks for the idea!
For your final remark. You're very right that I'm underusing the marketing potential of these blog posts, and I'm still learning my way through content marketing. I'm also still struggling a bit with getting Wordpress to obey and make jump out call to actions. But maybe most importantly: I don't want to build an empty blog for pure marketing reasons and I'm trying to find the balance between these conversions and valuable content.
Thanks again for your input, I'll make work of it!
Once again, thanks for your input!