Is it a bad idea to launch near US election week?

Do you remember when Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram or any other major product launched? Exactly, launching is not that important, just do what you need to give value to your customers, they won’t care the date.

I think the disturbance will be much longer than that, kind of like when covid hit. Regardless of who wins, the losing side will not readily concede, and people will go crazy for weeks. It’s grim but I would say either launch before it or end up waiting for weeks for things to calm down.

Is your product currently available for sale? If so, congrats! You are now launched.

I would optimize for getting into market as early as possible so you can understand whether people actually want what you're making and not overthink the "perfect timing" to launch.

Waiting for the right moment to launch sounds like an excuse to procrastinate / avoid critical feedback from the market.

I am launching my product, ruttl.com around the election time as well. Given that my audience is going to be majorly located in western countries, in my opinion, I think that's independent from the elections honestly. Yes, definitely people search for election news a lot, but the community over here is quite active and I think people will be still equally interested in finding new products to use.

I'd definitely wait until after the election. I think your intuition is right.

Perhaps you could monitor the engagements that Product Hunt launches get over the coming weeks and see if they noticeably fall from the mean. If they don't, maybe it's worth giving it a go?