Being featured on Product Hunt has opened the gates to Asia for this startup. Here’s how.

Launching a startup and getting attention is really hard. According to this Infographic, over 100 million startups are being launched every year, from which 1.35 million only in tech. As the barriers in launching an online business are lowering more and more, the number of startups beginning their journey every year is expected to rise even further.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve invested $10,000$ or $1,000,000 in your product development and little in marketing – when you start in the business world you’re on equal terms with anybody else who’s starting up so you’d better prepare well, work hard and have faith. Or patience.

Trying to get a lift-off with your startup is like living your life – sometimes you win, sometimes you learn – while moving forward and doing things better and wiser. With every step you make, you’re getting closer to that day when many eyes will be on your product.

We’ve launched uKit’s English closed-beta version at the beginning of April 2015, after 1 year of development, with the clear objective to gather as much feedback as possible and correct the eventual bugs, until going live in May. Just as a quick description, uKit is an intuitive mobile-first website builder for businesses, startups and freelancers.

A bit more than a month inside with the closed beta version, we managed to get a few registrations, using some internal channels, personal connections and social media. But it was just in the range of a few hundreds, nothing spectacular. We managed to land a few reviews, but the stats were not very encouraging for most of our closed-beta mode.

For our monthly closed test we tried the Launch tool made by the guys from Prefinery, which I really recommend especially for managing invite-only systems and pre-launch pages for capturing e-mails from people interested in your product.

During that time, we have collected valuable feedback and corrected a few system bugs after which we decided to go live with our open beta and remove the closed-invitation system.  Meanwhile, we also managed to get featured by the guys from Beta Bound and a few other resources, being politely rejected by a few.

Nevertheless, among the initial resources that turned us down initially was Product Hunt, the “poster child” of Silicon Valley and the go to place to find new startups and apps. The very reason why we didn’t qualify initially was because we were in closed-beta and had the invitation system in place.

Two days after our switch to public beta, I followed-up and luckily, we got an ok from the team. After one day of preparations and great support from Bram, the European Community Manager, the big day came – uKit went live on Thursday, the May 27, 2015.

As an insider tip, I found that the best time to post on Product Hunt is around 1:30 to 2:00 AM PST but I guess those slots were taken as we did go live around 3:00 AM PST – it turned out that I wasn’t the only one to find out about this. As the best day to post, I’d do it anywhere from Tuesday through Thursday and avoid week-ends at all costs as there’s little engagement then.