Launching my motion graphics editor, Motionity
Launching my motion graphics editor, Motionity
Issue #29
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Hey all,
I know I haven't sent out an issue for a couple of weeks now, but to be honest I didn't really have much to talk about. I kind of feel like the weekly format isn't necessarily working for me, so I might just send out updates whenever I have them, so I don't have to rush every week. Anyway.
Launching my motion graphics editor
This week I finally launched my motion graphics editor. It was a bit unexpected, and to be honest I randomly decided to do so last weekend.
I had a fair bit of tasks still missing, plus plans for the product to make money and market it well, but I realized it just didn't feel worth it to me.
So I just did a few small things and put it out there:
Not a whole lot. Here's a quick rundown from the Notion tasks:
I ended up deciding to call the tool Motionity (in a similar vein to Screenity), and bought the domain https://motionity.app. I kept the logo I had already made.
I didn't actually make the site responsive for mobile. I just put a disclaimer on unusable screen sizes saying that the editor can only be used on larger screens.
Fixed some tiny bugs. To be honest i didn't thoroughly test the tool, I just decided to fix things as people came across them. Thankfully it hasn't been a whole lot.
Made a teaser video for the tool. I was dreading this part a lot, and since I just wanted to launch ASAP I just ended up trying not to be a perfectionist with it. Instead of making an overly complex and thoughtful video, I just recorded myself messing around with the editor, and cut it up in After Effects (unfortunately Motionity has no 3D effects, so I couldn't make the video it with it) to make it look fancy.
Created a thumbnail for Product Hunt. I just put the logo with the teaser video together like I usually do, and made it loop nicely. I think it helps make the product stand out in the front page.
A few hours before I launched the product I realized nobody would know how to use the tool. So I rushed to create a bit of a guide in Notion, explaining how to create videos with it.
After creating the guide, I decided to add it into the editor for first users (detecting the session, so returning users wouldn't have to see it) through a popup. I also felt I should include the Product Hunt post for more context, so what I did was add a fake play button video thing on top that linked directly to Product Hunt (which had the video itself to play anyway). Kind of clickbaity but it worked.
Once I had all of that done, I just scheduled it all (including the tweet), made the code open source on GitHub, and just waited for the launch day.
The launch
I wasn't particularly anxious about the launch, given I had rushed it and decided to essentially release an incomplete product (with no landing page, templates, or paid offerings), so I went in fully expecting to fail.
The product went live on Product Hunt at 8AM SF time on Wednesday, and it managed to stay in the top positions pretty early on, getting consistent upvotes. I was pleasantly surprised by the reception, with lots of positive comments, and by the end of the day I was able to stay on the #4 spot, which I'm pretty happy with.
Later on my tweet went out, which somehow managed to go a bit viral:
It was pretty good overall, with a lot of mentions and even being featured on some newsletters and on Sidebar. Somehow at about the same time a lot of my GitHub repos started going trending, and I was getting even more exposure through other tweets, for instance from GitHub themselves who mentioned my extension Omni:
On top of that I also managed to get a couple new sponsors for my GitHub Sponsors, which is great.
I also got several messages from companies looking to use the tool for enterprise with all sorts of use cases, but I don't know if I really want to tackle those. I might revisit this in the future but I am pretty tired of it for now at least.
Anyway, I guess I will be working on a new thing again. I already had an interesting idea to solve the issue of having too many tabs on the browser, specifically with comparing things like restaurants, hotels, movies, shows... I'm thinking of building some sort of tool where you can add any page into a grid / column layout that you can customize, and then potentially create collections and share with others to be able to add to them and make decisions (e.g. where to go, what to watch...).
That's all I have, sorry I'm not very inspired right now.
See you next week,
Alyssa X