Your first 48 hours in public.
Launch to your warmest audience first (your list, your community), post where your customers already are, reply to every single response for 48 hours, and ignore vanity metrics until the weekend.
What should I do on launch day?
- 1Email your list the moment the product is live. Short, personal, one link.
- 2Post in the 2–3 places your actual customers hang out, not every platform you have an account on.
- 3Pin the launch post, then reply to every comment, question, and DM within the hour if you can.
- 4Keep a note of every bug report and feature request. Thank people by name.
- 5Ship at least one visible fix before the 48 hours are up. People notice.
What should I ignore during launch?
Signup counts, follower counts, and anyone's launch thread that did better than yours. Two days of numbers predict almost nothing.
The metric that matters in week one: how many people came back the day after they signed up. That tells you if the product keeps its promise.
What if the launch flops?
Most launches are quiet, and quiet is survivable. A launch is a doorway, not a verdict, plenty of real businesses grew from a launch nobody noticed.
Do a second launch in a month. Nobody remembers or minds. "We just shipped the thing you asked for" is a better story than "we exist" anyway.
Quick answers.
Should I launch on Product Hunt?
Only if your customers actually browse it. For most creator businesses, your own list of 200 warm people outperforms a front-page spike of strangers.
Do I need a launch video?
No. A clear screenshot and one sentence about who it's for beats a produced video you spent a week on.
When is the best day to launch?
Tuesday through Thursday, morning in your audience's timezone. But shipping on the wrong day beats waiting for the right one.
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