Ready, set, ProductHunt?

So you've built this amazing product after a lot of hard work and it's time to release it, right?

Well yes, but actually no.

I'll talk about my personal experience with trying to launch as the first thing and why, in my opinion, it is not the wisest thing to do.

🅿Producthunt
As a founder, it is very tempting to post your product into ProductHunt as soon as finishing it.

This is a trap that I fell into when making our previous SaaS. We thought that our product was nice, finished, and would instantly take off when posting on ProductHunt. We ranked pretty high for the day since we got 200 upvotes, however, we barely received any signups(let alone conversions).

The reason we didn't convert many people was that our product had simple flaws that ruined our conversion.

Takeaways:

• ProductHunt upvotes do not necessarily validate your product.
• Don't launch on ProductHunt, before you have some beta users and initial feedback. Simple mistakes can really kill off your conversion and ProductHunt won't let you relaunch for 6 months.

🆕What I'll be doing differently
Before launching my next SaaS, https://featurebase.app, I want to:

1. Get at least 10 paying customers
2. Make sure the landing page is well-thought-out.
3. Ask for a lot of feedback and fix the problems that could potentially kill our momentum on launch.
4. Launch on other, smaller, platforms before. We have posted on sites such as BetaList and got some initial users from there.

📝Note
Keep in mind that this is my personal experience. Your situation might, and most likely is, entirely different.
The main point I'm trying to make is to make sure you don't have simple, avoidable mistakes in your product before launching on big sites such as ProductHunt.