Inception
When I was launching DailyWall on Product Hunt, Andrey Azimov was helping — I'm horrible at marketing. After re-cropping and re-compressing images for the seventh time we thought, wouldn't it be cool if a script did this?
Then we figured we probably weren't the only ones, and it should be a web app rather than a script. I opened an editor. 2.5 days later it was live.
What It Does
- Side-by-side live preview while you edit
- Guided editor with tips for every step
- Thumbnail validation and assistance
- Image cropping
- A preview page that looks like the live Product Hunt post
- Twitter and Facebook link-card validation
- Time in Product Hunt's timezone
- Downloadable Launch Kit — content in TXT, HTML and Markdown, cropped images, thumbnail, plus some pre-launch material from us
Andrey wanted a static preview page you could throw at Twitter's card validator or share with a team. That meant the app couldn't stay static.
How It Does It
Next.js over an Express server. Ant Design so we could throw the UI together fast. We copied Product Hunt's HTML for the preview. Firebase for persistence.
Preview Pages
Press “Create Preview Page” and we send the copy, cropped images and thumbnail to the server. You get a Product Hunt-shaped URL to a Product Hunt-shaped page, with a logo swap so you can tell them apart.
Use it to validate Twitter cards, share with your team, whatever. Delete anytime. Pages and assets purge themselves 24 hours after publishing.
Launch Kit
Press “Create Launch Kit” and we build a content file, zip it with the images, and upload it to Firebase Storage with a one-time link. After download it's deleted.
Content generation uses EJS for TXT and Markdown, then Marked for the HTML.
Launch
We used Preview Hunt to prepare the Preview Hunt submission. Meta.
It became #1 Product of the Day with over 1,200 upvotes — including Ryan Hoover — more than 2× the day's #2, and later #2 Product of the Week.
Andrey Azimov was a huge part of this. Follow him.