Our Sprint to Build a Trending Product

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As data and AI nerds, our team at Hexus was inspired by the viral popularity of Spotify's annual "Wrapped" recap. We wondered - could we create something similar in 24 hours to showcase people's ChatGPT usage over the past year?

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Why just a day? We wanted to capitalize on the early mover advantage, and launch quickly while Spotify Wrapped was still trending. It was an experiment in rapid product development.

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The idea was intriguing but the timeline seemed crazy - just 24 hours to design, build, and launch an entire product. However, we decided to embrace the constraints and sprint to make it happen.

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As Paul Graham says, there are only two roles in a start-up: Building and Selling.

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Our team has an extensive background in data analysis and visualization, allowing us to swiftly build the product, interface and data pipelines. More details on the technical side soon to follow in another blog post.

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Fun fact: Our founding team met researching dataviz in grad school so this passion project was a natural fit.

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Now on to the next challenge - "selling" on such short notice. Leading distribution and marketing involved positioning, drafting messaging, reaching out to creators, reviewers and AI influencers, and preparing content for maximum shareability, for which we had a few ideas:

• Ease of use: Making it super easy to onboard and share. Our tool is free to use and no sign up is required.
• Enabling virality: Capitalizing on trending memes like "How often did you think about the Roman Empire?"
• Optimizing for data sensitivity: Ensuring privacy controls to only allow sharing content that creators are comfortable with.

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We tapped friends and some AI influencers for feedback on their perception of our tool and testing for usability, iterating quickly.

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As our Tuesday midnight deadline approached, we hustled nonstop to promote the launch, targeting eastern hemisphere time zones to get a head start while the western hemispheres were asleep. We stayed up until 5am engaging with visitors and amplifying content. After a power nap, we resumed promotion nonstop on PH, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit.

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Traction & Learnings

By the end of the week, we achieved 1000s of site visitors, over 200 shares, over 50 upvotes on ProductHunt, and endless appreciation - impressive results for just 24 hours!

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While an exhausting sprint, this experiment gave us confidence to keep iterating and provided valuable lessons:

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1. Know your audience. For example, AI writers were super responsive and helpful, and most excited to share with their network
2. Distribution requires testing various channels to find product-market fit. While we got many upvotes on Product Hunt, many of the visitors who actually engaged with the app came from Reddit and newsletters.
3. Track and measure conversions to know what channels are working. This helped optimize our marketing efforts.

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I'd highly recommend this 24 hour launch challenge to anyone on the fence about starting a company. The tight timeline simulates start-up challenges and forces creativity among constraints. Though ChatGPT Wrapped was just a fun 24h project, we're eager to take these learnings into our next launch.

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If you’re interested in joining a scrappy team, we’re hiring founding engineers. Find details here:

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