Is it really worth spending more than 20min on your PH launch?
The first time I launched a product on PH we had a great success. It came completely as a surprise, as we didn't even plan it.
I was in a meeting with my co-founder and just thought it would be a good idea to end the day by launching on Product Hunt.
In 20 min our product was live and we ended up being the 4th product of the day.
The second time around we really want to do it well so we tried to be much more careful and followed all the advice we found online. It was a flop. Just 9 votes (probably all from family and friends).
So this third time (yes, we launched today our pretrained bots for eCommerce, take a look!) we went back to our 20min product hunt launch. Let's see how it goes. But whatever happens, I think nailing a PH launch is as random as creating a viral post so just don't overthink it too much. The future of your startup should not depend on the PH algorithm!
Actually, this is a discussion I'm currently having with my colleagues regarding BotMeNot's official launch (currently it's in beta).
I've been hearing lots of different things and it seems that even if you do follow all the recommended steps, it's still not guaranteed to succeed (I mean, of course). On the other hand, you may simply score on that day, and have a successful launch without much effort.
Generally, I do agree with your bottom line, even if the PH launch doesn't succeed (by whatever "success metric" you set), it's not a big deal. Growth rarely happens overnight, and after the launch, I think people should change focus to some steadier ways of acquiring customers.
Also, out of curiosity, have you had any experience with launching on PH multiple times?
The three times we've launched were in fact three variations/evolutions of the same product (Xatkit as a plain OSS platform, Xatkit for WP and Xatkit for WooCommerce). So we have not launched twice exactly the same product but kind of. This is also why I think there is so randomness in the process.
I also blog often and I do reshare old posts from time to time. Sometimes the resharing gets much more attention that what the original post publication got so...
Sorry for the delayed response, just wanted to thank you for the insights!
I'm also thinking about resharing stuff from time to time, just wanting to get some more new content on the website and blog first.