How to launch a product when a good product is no longer enough

Ten years ago, a single strong Product Hunt launch was sometimes enough for a successful product release. By the next morning, your product could land on the front page of TechCrunch, spread across the internet, and get that first real push - the one that helped it attract its first users and begin steady, deliberate growth.

I’m not saying it was easy. You had to prepare: find a strong hunter with authority inside Product Hunt, polish the screenshots, clean up the description, and be ready to answer messages around the clock if the project suddenly "took off."

Today, a good product is not enough. Your good product can be vibe-coded in a couple of days. Sometimes faster than the market even manages to understand that it was your idea in the first place.

And here’s the unpleasant part: the product itself doesn’t just move into the background. It moves even further back. Audience and marketing move to the front. If you have 100,000 followers on X, launching a new product will be noticeably easier than if you have zero followers, zero reach, and only the comforting belief that "the product will sell itself." It won’t.

In essence, launching a product has turned into finding the right audience and creating as many points of contact as possible between that audience and your product.

So let’s figure out how to launch a new product without an army of followers on X. Yes, you’ll have to spend a few bucks. But not the kind of money your imagination usually draws when you hear the word "marketing."

Start with a preliminary product test run. That’s what I call the first publication and basic testing on a minimal number of users. Just send the link to friends, brothers, sisters - even your mom if you have to. The point is to catch, with a fresh pair of eyes, everything that could ruin the first impression: from typos to a broken password recovery form. Hello, vibe coding. How the service behaves under real load is a separate conversation. Maybe we’ll come back to it later.

The main goal when launching a new service is to become familiar to the audience. On launch day, you need to be almost everywhere. Your product can be vibe-coded. Your marketing can’t. That’s exactly what you should take advantage of.

Don’t expect the launch to be over in one day. This isn’t a firework that pops and disappears. It’s a sequence of actions over two or three weeks, and some of them will later become a normal part of the product’s life.

Let’s say you’re launching a service for founders and technical people. Where do they hang out? Where do they publish their products? Where do they leave their emails and contact details? Exactly: Product Hunt, Uneed, and similar platforms.

You have a chance to collect not only emails, but also founder names, the names of their services, and other information that can help you make your emails personalized. And personalization is already a real opportunity to avoid spam filters and get noticed by a living human being.

Founders often use corporate inboxes where nobody bothers much with spam filters at all. So your chances of landing in the inbox are higher. After that, it’s your job: study successful cases, play with the copy, and remember that a simple plain-text email can sometimes work better than a designed one with a ton of layout and the look of something assembled in the marketing department of yet another evil corporation.

On average, 600–700 products launch on Product Hunt every day. Your chances of getting into the top 10 will be higher if you warm up the audience in advance through cold email outreach, instead of simply pressing the publish button and praying for upvotes.

But Product Hunt alone is not enough. Ideally, you need at least two or three points of contact with a potential user. Add your product to similar services, don’t forget Hacker News, and try inexpensive Reddit ads targeted at subreddits like /r/indiehackers and /r/startups. Even a $5 budget can be enough to start appearing in front of the right audience.

If someone sees your product in several places over a short period of time, the chance that they will notice it rises sharply. No magic. Just human memory finally stopping pretending that you don’t exist.

It’s also worth talking separately about how to get noticed. This is where the name, tagline, and logo suddenly matter. Yes, those exact things many people throw together 15 minutes before launch, and then wonder why the service looks like yet another clone of another clone.

Open any catalog of services and tools. Half the logos look like they came out of the same generator, the names sound the same, and the taglines can be swapped between products and no one would notice. Uniqueness becomes your chance to break out of this gray pattern. Use it.

A good example is the purchase of the friend.com domain for $1.8 million. The deal itself became advertising for a new AI companion that, at the time of the domain purchase, wasn’t even ready. Where to get $1.8 million for that kind of ad campaign is a separate question, but the point is clear: you need to stand out.

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is forgetting about the user immediately after registration. Recently, I came across a genuinely cool service. The idea was good, and so was the execution: they generated landing pages for businesses based on Google Maps reviews, using AI. A great example of a normal, useful application of AI for small businesses.

I wouldn’t use it myself - I don’t own a coffee shop. But I would almost certainly recommend it to a friend who does. I created an account, tested the service, and then what? Nothing. They made no attempt to bring me back, hook me, remind me about themselves, or move me to the next step.

Don’t forget about the marketing lifecycle. Set up automated emails, talk to users, and don’t abandon them after registration like a trash bag by the entrance. You can also use remarketing separately. Remind people who visited your site about yourself. Offer a discount to those who created an account but never made it to payment.

Remarketing is a genuinely powerful and underrated tool. A user can be scrolling through their favorite news site, and your SaaS banner will find them there on its own. Not because you’re a genius. Because that’s how normal advertising infrastructure works, and it would be strange not to use it.

Treat your project launch seriously and holistically. A launch today is not one day. It is two or three weeks of active work. Ad campaigns, remarketing, email outreach, and repeated touchpoints are part of the product. Just as important as the interface, onboarding, and the button that, hopefully, actually works when you click it.