Pre-Launching on PH Ship: 144 subscribers

About Product Hunt Ship
Some/most of you might know, Product Hunt (PH) has this section of the website for "upcoming" products. A few upcoming products get featured on the home page and there is a full list that you can access via the ellipsis on the top navigation. These are essentially landing pages with some handy analytics and integrations. There are several templates but the most popular one is called "Playful Chat." There is a freemium version and two paid monthly subscription plans at $70/month and $225/month. Both paid plans offer a one-time promotion on the site, while the most expensive plan offers webhooks and A/B tests.

Pros of the Platform
Creating this kind of page can help you build up some hype around your product and gather people whom you can converse with for feedback and notify when you launch. The more people subscribe, the easier your product will stand out in the "upcoming" list, the more subscribe. A flywheel of attention. The biggest subscriber count I've seen is 14k but that's probably an outlier.

Social Proof
In startup land, this phenomenon is referred to as "social proof." It creates pressure on the person looking at the website to take action. An example of this is "x number of people booked this" on Opentable or "x person bought y item" on any eCommerce website. FOMO is a well-known company that offers it as a service for websites.

My experience
Automagic — this is my second PH Ship page. When you put up a pre-launch page on this website, it makes sense to subscribe to their PRO plan and pay $70/month of the one-time promotion period and the PH community is very active. However, it's very important that you remember that a single Ship page can only get promoted once.

On my first go, I requested to get promoted immediately and got a tini-tiny bump of a few subscribers. That was a mistake!

Second time around, I took the time to share with friends and networks like Makerlog, IndieHackers, Reddit & WIP.chat to build up this first base of 100 people. I've contacted the PH team to schedule my promotion two weeks from now, so I can continue building momentum and it will be easier to gain subscribers on promo day and subsequently, launch day.

Copywriting
I recommend that you write your copy elsewhere and paste it into PH Ship. I made myself a Notion document that counts characters for each field and a formula that says if I'm under or over the character limit.
Bugs & comms

While making pages I noticed that uploading images might break the platform, so I suggest that you always fill in the text first and then upload the images. You can even try uploading images after publishing the page so that all your work is saved.
Lastly, there are a few bugs! I was unable to:

1. Select Unsplash images for the background
2. Set my second page for promotion

The support team, especially Jacq, are super responsive and helpful, so if anything, uses the Intercom to reach out!

Thanks for reading & happy shipping!