Sharing here how we did it. Maybe it'll help you with your launch too.
Focus on the core features of your product. Don't start building every little thing you can think of. What do you need to build for your product to function? For us, it was users searching and applying to jobs.
A very good blog post from @levelsio building an MVP:
https://levels.io/how-i-build-my-minimum-viable-products/
Join communities where your target audience hangs out and be an active member. Provide value, feedback, and ask questions. We are an active member of Makerlog, Reddit, Pioneer.app, and Indie Hackers.
We would not be where we are without their early feedback. We constantly talked to our users, asking if they found value in our product, if they would keep using it, what would they like to see and iterated based on that feedback.
We launched 2 times before on https://news.ycombinator.com/show before getting to #1. Every week, we updated communities of new features/milestones like
https://getmakerlog.com/, IndieHackers, https://reddit.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook groups.
Some great resources we used:
https://levels.io/product-hunt-hacker-news-number-one/
https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-i-launched-the-2-most-upvoted-product-of-all-time-on-product-hunt-f3772fb20ad8
Prepare for the best-case scenario. You do not want to upgrade your server during launch day as your site will be down for 10 mins or more. We scaled our https://www.linode.com/ server up 2 hours before our launch which helped tremendously.
Add a way for users to subscribe to your mailing list. Make sure it's ready before you launch. We collected emails to our Postgres database and transferred it to https://mailchimp.com/.
Example from http://makebook.io:
Show HN: I made a site that lets you subscribe to pet food delivery
Our HN title:
Show HN: I made a site that aggregates entry-level positions
And it worked..
Posting at 12:01 am maximizes your product's 24-hour time frame. When we launched, we had the highest # of traffic between 12 am - 6 am pst. If we had launched any later, we would have missed out.
We shared our HN post with a few friends within the first hour which helped move us from newest to show. From there, we were in the top 10 on Show HN which helped with more people viewing and we took off.
People that follow you and like what your doing will check out your launch. If you're in the front-page by now, leverage that and let people know. We sent out multiple updates letting our followers know where we placed.
Stay in the comments and reply positively. Hacker News comments can destroy your launch so be careful. Luckily, we received lots of good feedback. Our product, rose through the ranks thanks to the comments.
And that's all we really did. I believe if it worked for us and many others, it will work for you. Good luck!
Here's our Hacker News page if you want to check it out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691295
Also, created a twitter thread if you want to check it out.