#53: Steven Tey - #1 Product of the Month, Product Hunt Launch Tips, and Twitter Growth Hacks

Sup nerds, welcome to the Jason Levin Show where I talk to the craziest viral marketers blowing up the internet.

Crazy.

What are you waiting for? Let's go blow up the internet. Sup nerds, today you're gonna meet an internet hustler of the highest standards. Steven Tay was a DevRel at Vercel and now he is the founder of Dub.co, which is basically Bitly on steroids. I'm telling you, Dub.co is amazing. I love using it. It is my go-to link shortener. You could use all your different domains. It is insane. So Stephen hit number 1 product of the month on Product Hunt, and he's gonna be sharing a lot of tips and tricks for going crazy, hitting number 1 on Product Hunt. Let's do this. Let's go blow up the internet. All right, Stephen, you hit number 1 product of the day, product of the week, and product of the month. What was the strategy? How did you do that?

It was honestly surreal. I still cannot believe we did that. But basically, I actually wrote up a full, like, interactive blog post about how we did it, but it basically boils down to one, having a good product, two, having a strong community around your product on launch day that can support you, and three, having really nice like launch assets when it comes to 4 to 5 thumbnail images that you're gonna upload to Product Hunt. That really helps as well. And at the end of the day, like also interacting with the community, responding to every comment, Getting as much feedback as you can. I think that's the main value that you can get from Product Hunt. So yeah, those are, I think, the most important parts.

Yeah. How did you build up your community beforehand? It's a question that a lot of founders ask me, and just wondering if you have any advice for people.

Of course. We are a fully open source product, and that what that means is that our entire code base is actually public, so you can actually go in there and see how everything works. And I know that might be like a little crazy to some people. Wow, why would I share my code? But at the same time, it really helped us build out like the initial community around it because there's this new movement of building software that's open and that's, that has really good longevity because the sort of thesis is that even though, even if your company goes under, touch wood, we won't do that, but even if it goes under in the future, the codebase is public so people can still hosted. And the cool thing about this is that we get to work with a lot of amazing like enterprise and even governments. I cannot share who yet, but we're working a few governments who are using our product as a link shortener. And I think that's really cool. So going back to your question, I think the open source aspect really helped us build up the initial community because people were just captivated by the fact that there's this open source alternative to Bitly that's so much better in terms of design. And at the same time, like, people just gravitated towards it. And I wouldn't even compare us to Bitly now because our feature set is so much more powerful than what Bitly offers. But yeah, that was the initial pitch. Open source Bitly alternative.

I love Dubb.co. This is not an advertisement. I just started using it after seeing them launch, and it has been so cool to use it for my newsletter, my podcast, my book, everything. I literally have everything. And so I just have my domain, which is jlev.work, and then just switched everything. And I could finally see how many people are clicking the link in my Twitter bio. And after every post, I'm literally using a Dub.co to see how many people are clicking and you see it in real time. It is insane. So I am just a huge fan of the product as somebody who makes a living off the internet and is huge into link tracking and analytics. Absolutely love it. There's also, not to mention this, UTM tracking. If you're a newsletter nerd like me, I could see like exactly, and it's UTM tracking builder. Sorry, I'm just going to talk about your product this whole time because I love it. But yeah, UTM tracking. So literally just like a button. I was doing it manually, bro. Like I was doing and, and UTM underscore medium. I was typing that out. I was living in the stone ages. So this is huge. I really love it.

Look at you, bro. First of all, I appreciate you talking about the product. It really makes me excited about what we've built. But I love that you mentioned making a living because that's something that we are actually going to be working on, building this feature that will allow you to do that even more. And this feature that we're working on is basically conversion tracking. And what that basically means is that every time someone clicks on the link, you can actually, like, the site that it redirects to can actually start tracking when that user actually converts to a signup and converts to a paying user. Essentially that powers the entire like affiliate marketing space. And that's actually a space that I'm deeply like intimate with and familiar with. I can go a lot more into that later on, but yeah, I think that feature is gonna be very exciting for folks like yourself. I'm assuming you do a lot of affiliate marketing too. So yeah, I just wanted to bring that up.

Oh my God, that makes me so happy. I was literally just talking with a friend about it because I could see the UTM campaigns in Beehive, the newsletter platform. I could see how many link clicks people are hitting with Tweet Hunter. That's the big one that I do affiliate with, but I can't really like track too much. I don't have a nice database of it. And the Dubb.co dashboard is insane. It's beautiful. It's very fast. Also like really fast. I don't know how you guys did that. But just super fast. So I'd love to talk more about your background, Stephen. I know you worked at Vercel. Could you tell maybe the listeners what that is and what you did there, how it prepared you to go and launch your own company too?

Yeah, for sure. I worked at Vercel for the last 2 and a half years. I started in July of 2021. And what Vercel is, is basically think of it like the next generation Heroku or AWS. It's basically a much better. Developer experience, and it gives you way better performance when it comes to building and scaling applications, uh, whether it's a website or web application. So I joined when there were like 80 people, and then, uh, within a year and a half we grew to 400. So I saw that entire like hypergrowth phase, and what I did there was a lot of like developer advocacy work. And what that means is basically building really cool projects that showcases how you can use Vercel's technology, whether it's Next.js, TurboRepo, the AI SDK, all those kind of developer tools. So that was basically what I did there. I had a ton of fun, but at the end of the day, I was a founder at heart. I've— the funny thing is, ever since joining— prior to joining Vercel, I was actually working on this project called One Word Domains, which I did launch on Product Hunt too, back in 2020. And I was about to start a company around One Word Domains. I was like, wow, this is— it's doing really well. It got number 2 product of the day, won a Golden Key Award. I was like, okay, maybe this is like my calling. And then I got to know Guillermo Rauch, who was the founder of Vercel, and we started talking. And eventually, prior to me raising around for Warmware Domains, he actually convinced me to join Vercel. And that's how I ended up like basically putting my founder dreams on hold to really learn and grow at a fast-paced growing startup, which taught me a lot. But at the end of the day, like I really wanted to build my own like company. And that's when Dubs came out as a side project. I can go more into that too, but yeah, that's like how I, eventually progressed into starting a company around Dubb.

Yeah, please go into that. How did you start Dubb?

Sure, sure. So Dubb started as a side project when I was at Vercel. I basically had a need to be able to share links with really nice OG images, like the preview cards that you see on iMessage, on Twitter. And sometimes when you share a link to a third party, I don't know, like a really old site that doesn't have proper images. You can actually put your own image on Dubb, and that's an initial use case that came out of it. When I started, I was like, okay, this is cool, maybe a fun lifestyle business. I had no intention of actually raising capital for it or like doing it as a venture scale. But over time, as I started talking to more users, I realized that people were actually using it for affiliate marketing, which I had a lot of experiences with when I was building Wild Word Domains. I would work with people like GoDaddy, Namecheap on their affiliate programs. And we will use this like really old legacy, terrible software to track the earnings. And I was like, okay, this is a space that I know needs innovation. And we have this amazing link product that it's just a natural extension of all the short links that are already on Dubb. So I was like, okay, I'm connecting the dots here. And there's a lot of opportunity in building this as a company. And that's why I started it. We actually, we actually have been working on it a little bit. And basically the project started back in, it was like October of 2022. So I've just been building it on the side nights and weekends. So we had a sort of foundation for the product, but it wasn't until January that I went full-time on it. And then that really kickstarted the next level of growth. Like our revenue has been doubling, actually growing at like a 30 to 40% rate every single month ever since I started. And yeah, just all the stats that we have, like number of links, number of clicks, that's just been through the roof. So yeah, I'm very excited to see where this goes.

Dude, I'm excited too. And I love the product. It's one of those products that like you just use and it's delightful. I don't know how else to describe it. It makes me happy to use and, and been loving it. So I, I want to jump back into the actual Product Hunt launch. All right. So how long did it take to prepare for that? And, and did you do anything special? Did you get like a hunter? Did you, did you have some database beforehand of all your stuff with your team? How did— walk me through like the days leading up to launch. How many Red Bulls did you drink? Let's hear it.

That's a great question. So we actually started preparing for our Product Hunt launch about a month before the actual launch. And most of the preparation was done around the design assets. We really wanted to have really kickass thumbnail images for our launch page. And a week before launch, what I did was I basically tweeted out that we were launching on Product Hunt after over a year of building Dubb. And that sort of resonated with a lot of people because we've already built up an existing community both on GitHub and Twitter about people that are excited and love Dubb as a product. And that post did really well and we got over 100 people join the waitlisting that Product Hunt has. Really cool feature, by the way. Yeah. And the day of the launch itself, it was just basically me spamming my Twitter feed like every hour or two, just putting up tweet about, oh, we're launching, how we're doing. I actually didn't reach out directly to a lot of people except for a few like closer people that I was closer with. And we didn't really have a database of folks. We just really leveraged our existing open source community. And that really helped a lot as well as my Twitter audience. And I think that really helped drive the sort of initial traction. So within the the first hour we got to the upvotes and that sort of put us in the lead. I remember it was like a Thursday. So I generally recommend if you want to get first, you should launch on like Fridays and weekends. But if you want to get the most eyeballs, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursdays are the best to launch. And we went with the Thursday cause it was like, why the hell not? And it turned out pretty well, which I'm really happy for. But yeah, going back to your question about Hunter, we actually did not use Hunter. Because I've heard from a few folks that you can just, just hunt your own product. And I personally had about, I think, 4,000, I don't remember, followers on Product Hunt. So that was like a decent amount, not crazy. But even if you don't have that many, you can still hunt your own product. I don't think it makes a huge difference to have a top hunter, but maybe that's just my opinion. So that's basically what we did.

You're definitely right. I think having a top hunter can be helpful if they're also providing kind of advice on the assets. But if you can figure that stuff out yourself, or if you feel confident about it, you don't really need one. And it's not going to guarantee you number one. There's plenty of times where specific hunters will launch it and it's not number one. That's really also interesting. Yeah, just the game. Rajiv, our CEO, talks about the two games on Product Hunt, which is basically, are you going for number one or are you going for just give as much value as possible? And I find the people who are going for number one are like, all right, let's do it on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Whereas the people who are just trying to give as much value to as many people as possible are like, who cares if I get number one? I just want as many eyeballs seeing it as possible. So I'm going to launch on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Who cares if it's competitive? I just want as many people using my product as possible. And those tend to be the ones that are like really special.

Exactly. And the next level is, I'm not sure what happened on Monday, basically with Cal.com and Supabase. The, the two Java bots just went head to head. That's like the craziest. And I think that's really good because both of them got like a ton of upvotes and it wouldn't have been possible if they didn't go head to head. And I'm lowkey like super relieved that we didn't launch in April because there was no way we can have gone head to head with those two launching.

Sorry, dude. So I did that demo or I did a Twitter Space with them yesterday. Super fun. Cal.com versus Supabase launch mania. Wanted it to be like a WrestleMania feel, and hopefully we'll be doing a bit more of these. And one of them revealed, they're like, hey, so I gotta tell you guys a secret. This was all a marketing hack. Like I invested in the other person's company. Like I was like, oh my God, you guys just faked this rivalry for 20 days. And I was like, you know what? This could be a repeatable hack for founders. So founders out there, if you're launching on Product Hunt and if you have a friend Or if you invested in a company or maybe you're investors, whatever. If you guys want to fake a little rivalry to drive up attraction, yo, people love drama. The timeline loves some drama. Like I was retweeting that stuff. Our entire Slack was going nuts over these guys and it turns out they were just like best friends and investing in each other.

So good work guys.

That's some scrappy marketing.

That's super smart. I knew it from the start because I'm close friends with them, but it was also like, it reminds me of what YouTubers would always do, like Logan Paul and KSI, like the whole fight thing that they sort of like hyped up. And it's, it's really smart marketing. People love talking about drama. People love just gossiping. And I think people who didn't know better would be like, oh, what's this drama going on? And it's just word of mouth that happens organically. And you don't have to pay a single cent and pay ads. So it's just brilliant.

Dude, it's so smart. Ryan Reynolds, marketing genius, the actor, he and Hugh Jackman do that sometimes just to hype each other up. It's good when you have that, that squad to do that. Makers. That's why. Yeah.

Have you seen like Mint Mobile ads? Ryan Reynolds?

Dude, he's a genius, man. He is incredible. Like just, I read a thread about him a bit ago and some of the stuff he did. Also, one thing he did was like, he went on TV shows or whatever and he would tell people to, or he went on talk shows and he told people, hey, email me ryan@mint.com. And then when they emailed him, obviously he's not responding, but it's just an auto emailer back with all of like his links and companies that he invested in or whatever. These little marketing hacks. Ah, so smart. So smart. I'm curious as well. So you're up to 42,000 followers on Twitter. A lot of my audience is Twitter native, people who are trying to build their Twitter as well. Any advice, any Twitter hacks?

I, that's a very good question because I actually did like a podcast/interview a while ago when I was at Vercel with the folks at.inc, shout out to them. It's called the Doc Podcast. If you search on YouTube, Stephen Tay is probably the first result. But basically what led up to all those followers was just the open source work that I did at Vercel where I would build viral side projects Whether it's an AI aging app that you upload an image and like shows you as you age over time, like a little GIF, or if it's like a Next.js starter kit, which for whatever reason it blew up, it got like 3,000 likes because it was like really well designed and had all the best practices and people just really liked it. So yeah, those were what I discovered worked really well with the Twitter algorithm. Like people just picked it up and they saw that I worked in Vercel. They were like, okay, a lot of my followers are I would bet like more than 50% are like developers. So I think that's also another thing. It really comes down to honing your niche and operating within that niche and doing really cool stuff. And I think that sort of drew the— I remember like when I started Vercel, I was like, I think I was like less than 5,000, I believe. And then I crossed like 10,000 in like less than a year. And then after I just kept compounding, I think compounding growth is pretty, pretty impressive. Yeah, consistency is another thing. I would make it a habit to tweet something cool out every single day, if not every single day, every single week. But yeah, I think those are a couple things that I did that really contributed to that.

Dude, compounding growth on the internet is a beautiful thing. It takes a little while. What's cool about Twitter as well is it starts as this habit that you almost have to force yourself, and then it just becomes part of your life if you're doing it long enough and it keeps growing. And I love what you're saying as well. I have something called the cool shit law. Build cool shit, you attract cool people. The more cool shit you build, the more cool people follow you and hit you up. And really the secret to growing on Twitter is just do cool shit and then tweet about it. It's super simple. Something I see Greg Eisenberg do a lot, he will tweet, he's hey, just got, just got off the phone with blah, blah, blah. Sometimes I just steal that hack and I go through my calendar. I'm like, who did I talk to this week? That was cool. What little tidbits do I remember? Like your calendar of meetings is low-key, like the best source of content. Just think about the, what you guys talked about and then talk about it. And if you're talking to cool people, you got endless content for days. So yeah, there's so many little hacks. Yeah.

That's true. I think, I think just being consistent and looking through what valuable content you can provide your audience, that's basically the secret to growing and I highly recommend this tool called Typefully, by the way. It's basically a Twitter scheduling tool and it's not just that, it's not just scheduling, it, it just gives you a really nice interface to just whether you're writing a thread, like multiple tweets, or if you wanna do like cross-posting to LinkedIn, or they even have this feature called like AI generate. It's not like those clichéd ones, it's actually value adds because it's like whenever you can think of a way, better way to phrase a tweet, you can just highlight it and be like, rephrase this. And that really helps. And you can upload images, videos, all those things. And it's a paid app, I believe, but it's given me so much value. I never use Twitter for drafting tweets because Twitter sometimes would just crash and you just lose all your progress.

Dude, I know. Or, and the drafts don't save from like mobile to web. It's so insane.

That's one of the, my biggest pet peeves.

Yeah, I use, I have Typefully and Tweet Hunter because sometimes you just need both. Typefully, I think is for writers and Tweet Hunter is for marketers is the metaphor that I like to use. Typefully, super relaxed UI, like very like calm. And then Tweet Hunter is just the writing is just like this part of it. And then everything else is like the marketing. I'm like, dude, like, but it works really well for marketers. Yeah, I love to hear it, dude. I'm really excited for your audience. I feel like it's gonna, it's gonna keep growing from just from mostly devs to a lot of marketers now too. And hopefully I could be help with that and lead some people your way too, because mine is mostly marketers and we're all hungry for cool new tools all the time. Yeah. So super stoked. Yeah. Oh, other questions about Dub.co. So how big is your team now? And then on top of the affiliate tracking, where else are you guys going? What's the plan?

Yeah. So our team is, we just brought on our first full-time engineer earlier this month. So it's a team of 2. And we're expecting to like grow really fast the next couple of months because the affiliate product that I talked about, I think that's going to unlock the next level of growth because our existing user base, a lot of them already use Dubb for affiliate marketing. Like they're YouTubers or content creators that use a lot of Dubb links or their own custom domains and they just want a way. Right now they're using it mostly to be able to provide, it's like basically compare like click data with how much they're actually getting paid out from all these brands they're working with. but imagine like a third party, like a product or platform that can serve both sides of the equation. Like we already have companies using us, like Framer is a good example. Vercel uses Dubb too. A lot of like amazing tech companies that are using Dubb and a lot of them really want to start an affiliate program. So it's a natural, like a marketplace to be able to connect these two sides of the equation. And ultimately what we're trying to build is this modular we call it SDK. It's just a fancy tech technical way of saying it's like a development kit for developers to be able to easily implement conversion tracking in their web application. So think of it, if you were like an indie hacker, you're building like a, I don't know, like an AI app and you want to work with content creators on TikTok instead of just throwing them your website domain and be like, oh, I paid them $500. That's it. You actually are able to start tracking the ROI. Like how much does $500 convert into? Should I keep paying them for the next month or should I move on to other creators? So instead of giving them your website domain, you can give them a short link that is powered by Dubb and you can see the actual like user journey from people on TikTok converting to paid users. Yeah. So that's the whole pitch, I think. Yeah.

So would you guys ever build a get rewardful competitor, because I, you know, I got paid $400 last month from Tweet Hunter. Pretty sick. But at the same time, I had to hit them up a few times on PayPal and like all this stuff. And I hate PayPal. Everybody hates PayPal. Why is it not linked to Stripe? If you guys could link to Stripe, that'd be wonderful.

But yeah, that's exactly— we're going to use Stripe Connect, which is exactly what Twitter does for— I'm not sure if you've been getting payouts from Twitter. Yeah, I've Couple, like $50 every couple weeks. Nothing crazy.

It pays for lunch sometimes.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly what we're using. So Stripe Connect to be able to pay out creators and affiliate marketers. And instead of having to manually tell them, oh, this is how many clicks we did, everything happens in Dubb. We basically, the brands can just go in there, one-click payout to every creator. After reviewing it, obviously. But yeah, I think just having a third party that's fully transparent and non-biased, I think that helps build trust between the two sides too. So I think that's— yeah, we're super excited about that. I think that's going to be big.

Sweet. Super excited. Cool, man. These were all like the main things I wanted to cover. We could just keep it short and sweet. I think you gave some really excellent Product Hunt hacks and really excited for the future of Dubb as well. So thanks for coming on, man.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to see this go live and it's been a pleasure. Yeah. If any one of you are looking for more Product Hunt tips, we wrote a blog post on this. It's literally just d.to/playbook, another.link. You can just go to that blog post. It details, I think, 8 steps or 9 steps. I might have missed a few when I talked about it earlier. So I think that will be super helpful too. So yeah, check that out.

Sweet. And I'll link that in the show notes. Alright, thank you.

Awesome, thanks a lot.