24HourHomepage.com — Weeks 19 & 20 — Recharging, Reddit and Releasing the Press

3 min readJul 15, 2021

tl;dr: After a great, recharging vacation, I engaged with more communities on Reddit, booked more podcasts, planned my Product Hunt launch and hired a PR company to help get the word out.

# Overview

Since launching the product several weeks ago, I hadn’t taken much time off from growing the project. That changed this last week when my fiancé and I went to Baja to celebrate her 30th birthday. A lot can be said about taking time with your loved ones. I’ll say, it was lovely.

We got back well-rested and recharged and I continued to reach out to podcasts, started some discussions on Reddit, booked a PR team and came up with some sidecar marketing stunts.

# Reddit

By design, this whole journey is forcing me to participate more in online communities. Well, Reddit has loads of those.

You probably know Reddit is huge and its culture drastically varies subreddit to subreddit. I spent about a week contributing to the site, mostly on subreddits with an entrepreneurial or creative business lean.

Eventually, I shared 24HourHomepage.com and boy was that contentious. Many subreddits loved the site, but one was pretty critical. At least there, there was a strong sentiment that advertising in and of itself is capital-B-bad.

I disagree.

When done right and especially when the audience anticipates the content, advertising is a great form of storytelling. Even those who “hate” advertising would probably not hesitate to answer one of my favorite questions: “What was your favorite commercial growing up?”

I’m still contributing to Reddit and will return to the subreddit when the project is more complete! ✌️

# UPDATE: Minor product changes

I started a number of conversations via cold email this week. A particularly fruitful one had me evaluate two conditions in the Terms of Service:

1. The maximum purchase amount
2. The publication deadline

Before launching, I set restrictions on both the number of units a customer could buy at once and how long they could wait until publishing. Both were set in an attempt to guide a more diverse and creative final product.

In hindsight, both were too restrictive. A premature optimization.

You can now buy up to 1000 seconds at a time and the 30 day publication window has been removed. 🎉

Thank you, Colin Wright for the thoughtful feedback!

# Product Hunt

The date is set. The calendar cleared. Sunday August 1st is dedicated to the launch on Product Hunt. There will be special surprises that day…so stay tuned…

Before then, what do you think of this launch video?

# PR Team

To aid in my press release distribution efforts, I hired a PR team to get the word out. Nothing to report yet, but I’m excited to share the results in the coming weeks.

Big thanks to my brother Jered for the recommendation! 🤗

# This week

My focus this week is to focus on marketing. I know that sounds pretty vague, but I’d like to launch some sister projects to aid in growth of 24HourHomepage. All of it marketing work under the 24HourHomepage umbrella. The goal is to schedule the development and distribution of those ideas.