No, this is exactly how early-stage startups often work. It's a great lesson to anybody who hasn't experienced it. Planned launches rarely go as well as planned

No, this is exactly how early-stage startups often work. It's a great lesson to anybody who hasn't experienced it. Planned launches rarely go as well as planned, and big visibility happens when you are the least prepared. Been there, experienced that. According to the team, this was a side project, they had put a crappy landing page out there (with Times Roman as a font and got some flak for that) and somebody else submitted it to Product Hunt and it took off. They quickly improved the landing page and started handling orders. Now almost everybody reading HN knows them. They chose a brand name that is easy to remember. If they get their shit together in 6 months and relaunch, they will be totally fine. Most early stage startups can only dream of the kind of visibility they got. The bigger problem is that this kind of surprise success doesn't necessarily validate the idea, but at least now they can see and start to measure retention.