Developers spend months building. Distribution often gets one afternoon.

I've noticed this pattern with indie projects:

Weeks or months go into building the product.

Then launch day arrives and the distribution plan is basically:

"I'll post it on Product Hunt and Twitter."

I've done enough research into launch platforms to realize how incomplete that approach can be.

There isn't really one "best" place to launch.

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

For a developer tool, you might care about reaching developers who can actually use the product.

For a B2B SaaS, relevant buyers may matter more than raw traffic.

For an unfinished product, getting 20 useful beta users may be more valuable than getting 2,000 random visitors.

For SEO, an evergreen listing might be more valuable six months from now than a launch-day spike.

That's why I built Best Launch Platforms — a research project that compares 70+ launch and product discovery channels.

I'm trying to look at launch platforms through a few different lenses:

Reach — how much potential exposure is there?

Intent — are people actually looking for products?

Fairness — can a small/new project realistically get visibility?

Evergreen value — does the listing continue to matter after launch day?

AI visibility — can the platform contribute to discovery through AI/answer engines?

Ease — how much effort does it take to get listed or launch?

The interesting part isn't the ranking itself.

It's seeing how different the "best" platform becomes depending on the job you're trying to get done.

Would love to hear from other builders:

When you've launched something, how did you decide where to launch it?

Gut feeling? Previous experience? Audience overlap? A spreadsheet? Or did you just post everywhere and see what happened?