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?
Something worth separating out here: the only audience number that actually matters for a PH launch is not visits or followers, it is how many people you can personally notify in the first few hours and reasonably expect to open the message.
PH weights early velocity heavily. A launch that picks up its first 40 upvotes inside hour one behaves very differently from one that collects the same 40 spread across the day. Which is why "build an audience" is too vague a goal for a delay like this. The concrete version is building a list of individual people you can reach directly on launch morning: email addresses, DMs, a Discord where you are already a known name. Two hundred followers who may or may not be served your post is worth less than thirty people whose inbox you land in.
For context, I work on growth at Ojin and we are in a similar prep position. The thing that actually changed our plan was auditing the notify-able list rather than the follower count, and those two numbers were nowhere near each other.
Applied to templates, that probably makes your 10 free downloaders the most valuable thing you have right now, precisely because you have a direct line to them. Ten people who reply to an email will do more for launch day than a much larger number who might scroll past a post.
Happy to, and the honest framing first: we are roughly where you are, so treat this as method rather than proven results. Our own page sits at 0 followers and I am building the same list from scratch. What I can give you is the shape of it, because that part I have thought about properly.
The first thing that helped was dropping the word list. It implies a mailing tool and an audience you do not have yet. What you actually need is a spreadsheet with two columns: a person, and how you will reach that specific person on launch morning. Channel does not matter and does not need to be consistent. Email, LinkedIn DM, a Discord handle, a WhatsApp thread, all count equally, because the only property that matters is that a message from you arrives in a place they look.
That reframe matters for you specifically, because you said you have no audience beyond here and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a perfectly good channel for this. You cannot export anyone’s email, but you can DM them, and a DM from someone whose posts they have read outperforms a broadcast email from a stranger by a wide margin. The absence of an email list is not the blocker it feels like.
The other thing: you already have the beginning of it and might not be counting it. You mentioned 10 free downloads. Those are ten people who wanted the thing enough to take an action. If you captured any way of contacting them, that is your list, and it is ten times the size of what most people have on the day they book a launch.
The habit that builds it fastest is one question at the end of any genuine conversation, including ones like this: "would it be alright if I let you know when this goes live?" Almost everyone says yes, it is not a pitch, and it converts a conversation into a launch-day contact. Do that every time and the number climbs on its own without a single follower.
One thing I would avoid: buying or scraping anything. A stale or cold list will not open on launch morning, and for Google and Microsoft inboxes a burst of non-engagement damages your sending reputation, which then quietly hurts the transactional email your actual customers depend on. Thirty people who genuinely reply is worth far more than a thousand who do not.
Thank you, how do you build such a list @Ojin
Because, to be honest, I have no audience I can leverage other than here and LinkedIn; my Twitter is also still heavily growing. I would appreciate your insight and suggestion do you have for me?
Postponing was probably the right decision. Product Hunt can amplify existing interest, but it rarely creates durable demand from nothing. I’d use the delay to collect a few real customer stories, sharpen the landing page, and build a small group of people who already understand the product before choosing a new launch date.
Thank you,
That is exactly what I would do.
Please, if you would not mind, is there a means you know that is efficient that helps me with this collection? I just need ideas, if you have any
I'm not convinced PH is the best place to launch, particularly for IHs where many of the products are quite technical. You want a more targeted audience. There are many places to launch, and you should "launch" many times.
Who are your best customers? Where are they? Go there. Launch there.