Is Product Hunt still worth it?
For B2C and developer tools, yes — top-5 still drives 5–15k visitors in 24 hours. For pure B2B SaaS, less than it used to. Either way, treat it as a milestone, not a strategy.
The four-week prep
Week 4: pick a Tuesday/Wednesday launch (lower competition). Week 3: write the tagline, prepare the GIF. Week 2: tell 50 people personally and ask them to comment, not just upvote — comments rank higher than votes.
Day-of essentials
Launch at 12:01am PT. Pinned founder comment with the story. Reply to every comment within an hour. Don't ask friends to upvote — Product Hunt detects it and you'll get throttled.
What actually moves the needle
A demo GIF that shows the product working in 8 seconds. A tagline that names the user and the outcome. Comments — not votes — from people in your target market.
After launch
The traffic dies in 48 hours. Have onboarding, a follow-up email and a payment flow ready. A bad post-launch experience burns the goodwill faster than the badge earned it.