Ship is a product by Product Hunt that provides you with a pre-launch landing page and a way to communicate with the people who are interested. It also gives you some randomized exposure on their website and email newsletters. It is designed especially for startups to capture early signups for their product before it ships without needing to build out a sophisticated landing page.
The main downside of Ship is that you cannot do Ship and ALSO post your product to the Product Hunt homepage at the same time so you are missing out on the gobs of traffic that the Product Hunt homepage could send.
If you are comfortable having a bit of a "pre-launch" period and don't have the time/resources to build your own teaser website, I think Ship is a great resource. However, I would avoid making Ship your big launch strategy since Product Hunt can send so much more traffic. Even if you are launching a private beta, I would recommend the same strategy — use Ship as a lead-up but actually launch the beta on Product Hunt.