Research

Learn from Product Hunt launches in your space

If they were successful, what can you learn? If they didn't do well, are there any mistakes you can avoid?

Decide whether to use Product Hunt Ship

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.

Read some stories about successful launches and glean the relevant nuggets for your launch

I hope this guide will help you but there are tons of other great resources that you can check out online (I started a list below)