LPT: Don't overthink your Product Hunt launch, some of the advice out there will actively hurt you

Seriously, just launch it.

I'm building Job Board Fire, and I launched version 1.0 three years ago with 0 prep and no email list, got product #3 of the day.

I launched version 2.0 two years ago. It started off as a disaster. I scheduled it to launch at 12:01, then cancelled the scheduled post. It somehow went through anyway. I found out we launched with 0 product photos and no description because someone from PH messaged me on our live chat.

I took screenshots of our site so post wasn't completely empty, patched the whole post up in < 5 mins and somehow managed to pull off product #2 of the day.

I just launched Job Board Fire 3.0, and let me tell you I was sweating this launch. We rebranded our whole site. I spent time on an animated explainer video. I was looking up guides on how other people managed their Product Hunt launch. I was getting in my own head.

One of the pieces of advice that I came across a couple of times was to wait 30 mins to an hour after 12:01 to make sure you don't have any big competitors on launch day. For whatever reason this made sense to me, so I spent ~30 mins just making sure Stripe doesn't decide to drop the hottest new fintech product.

None big launched anything, so I thought the coast was clear and posted my product.

The result is that my most thought-out launch, with the best version of my product, the biggest email list, and the most effort put into the actual post itself is completely dead on arrival.

By waiting 30 mins to make sure I'm not competing with any giant product launches, I managed to get myself buried under every other product launch. Now Job Board Fire is squarely stuck as product #20, and I don't see a way out of it because I'm pretty sure none opens the 2nd page of anything.

TL;DR: By far the most important thing is to post at 12:01am, it doesn't matter how good your product is when you're buried so deep none even sees you.