I postponed my Product Hunt launch because 90 lifetime visits is not an audience
I sell Next.js templates. The product was ready, the launch was booked, and I cancelled it.
Reason: my store had about 90 lifetime visits. A PH launch with no audience is a coin flip you lose by default, so I moved it to October and spent the time on distribution instead: daily posts, a free lead magnet tier, and honest weekly numbers even when the number is zero.
Current numbers: 5 templates live, 10 free downloads, $0 revenue.
Curious what worked for others here: did you build the audience before the launch, or did a launch ever work for you cold?
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It doesn't feel ethical to me to do distribution without a product. So I prefer talking to people about the problem I want to solve, rather than distributing a product that doesn't exist. That way I can evaluate if the product is worth building. I also wonder if having a simple MVP and a short demo video would be useful for distribution. Did you think about that? Or do you think it is just a delay?
I'm curious what evidence convinced you postponing the launch was the better bet than using the launch itself to discover whether distribution was actually the bottleneck.
That seems like a difficult decision to make before seeing the outcome either way.
Postponing PH at 90 visits is the right call — cold launch is usually a coin flip you lose.
Curious where you’re building the audience for the next few months — Reddit/forums, X, newsletter, something else?
If Reddit is in the mix: I built a daily scored digest for that hunt (threads where people already want templates/boilerplate). Happy to show a sample on your niche — or ignore if channel is different.