Product Hunt Launch - What Happened and Takeaways

It's interesting 2 contrasting advice are on the top posts in IndieHackers now. One is talking about don't get too excited over Product Hunt. The other sharing about the perfect preparation for Product Hunt launch. What do you think?

I myself launched Kaffae on Product Hunt 3 days ago with 140 upvotes. Let me share my takeaways.

1st advice post: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/your-obsession-with-winning-at-hacker-news-and-product-hunt-is-hurting-your-business-c05505b902
2nd advice post: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/launch-day-on-product-hunt-before-after-df41e50ee1
My Product Hunt: https://producthunt.com/posts/kaffae

I was preparing for this day almost for a year (It kept getting bumped in my todo list). But it wasn't me who initiated. A marketing guy Craig stumbled upon the Firefox plugin, and he just shared it with crappy photos. Ugh. I only noticed it when my friend messaged me on LinkedIn.

I thought ok, I might as well get over it. And started promoting it among my friends. That was already after 15 hours from the initial post. It had only 10 upvotes. So, I thought it'd maybe go up about 20 with my friends. (Keep in mind I shared it on HackerNews earlier last week which got 0 votes. My expectation was very low at this point).

I shared it on my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I sent direct messages to 10 of my FB friends. And I sent about 50 messages on Twitter who were following me as well as Product Hunt. That's about it.

On top of lots of congratulation messages, I am quite surprised I get connection requests from LinkedIn from a few new people. And I've received a message from one of the venture capitalists. Also, I've received an email about an interview request. I've been developing it silo for quite some time, so this attention has been quite overwhelming so far to be honest.

I'm grateful for this outcome. But more than anything, I am happy I can get it off the long time todo list, so I can focus on other stuff like pitching journalists or writing a blog.

I have a few takeaways from the launch:

1. Don't stress yourself over Product Hunt launch. It's just a free forum after all. It doesn't make or kill your project. It's just one of the many places to receive product feedback.
2. Be prepared to launch on Product Hunt 4-5 times. InVision used to launch multiple times with a major update. And I'm planning on doing the same. You just build lots of features. That continuous launch mentality helps those who suffer from perfectionism.
3. Once you build public reputations, people become kinda nicer haha.

Cheers!