Nobody cares you launched

Most founders completely underestimate how useful a launch can be for a startup. They see companies that go from a basic MVP to 10k MRR literally overnight, and they think that they either:

• got lucky (tons of upvotes on Product Hunt/HN/Reddit/etc.), or

• had a huge audience beforehand (Instagram, LinkedIn, newsletter)

What I’m about to show you is the complete breakdown of how you can launch your startup and gain traction for your product extremely quickly.

Your product

The first step is actually evaluating your product. You’ve probably heard this advice 10,000 times, but your product needs to solve a painful problem.

You don’t need to change your idea; small variations to it are fine.

To give you an example, you’ve probably seen a million AI agents. For this example, we will specifically focus on coding agents.

I’ve seen so many coding agents online, but most of their launches fail pathetically.

On the other hand, I’ve seen companies like Freebuff and Bullet do insanely well. The only difference is that Freebuff has ads so it’s free, and Bullet is designed for max speed. That’s it: barely any change, but they focus on one painful feature instead of trying to solve a million things.

The ultimate launch schedule

I’m about to give you the ultimate schedule for your launch, step by step with detailed instructions. There are some steps in here that not everyone can do; if you can’t do them, just try your best or move on to the next step. However, this protocol is designed so that the important parts require zero existing audience and little luck.

Warm up your accounts and your audience

Most launch platforms require you to have “karma” or a certain amount of days on the platform to even post. As a result, make your accounts ahead of time and spend a little bit of time engaging and contributing.

If you have any kind of audience whatsoever (this can be 10 followers, 100, 1,000), just hint at them that you’re launching something big and try to suggest that they warm up their accounts on your launch platforms if they want to support you.

Test your product

Before your launch day, test the virality of your product. Put it on a smaller subreddit or a smaller Discord server and just see how people react. If you find any serious issues, then go back to your product and fix them.

Build a hub/testing center

In your product, you want to build some way that people can click on a link and quickly test your product without making an account (you can add a redirect after a little bit of testing to ask them to make an account or download).

If your product is hardware, then try to make something interactive or a nice landing page with clear visuals.

Platform 1: Product Hunt

On Product Hunt, not all upvotes carry the same weight. You can look for top hunters on the Product Hunt website, then try to find their accounts on X/LinkedIn and send them a friendly DM asking them to check out your launch.

This is the very first platform we are going to start the launch protocol on. At exactly 12:01 PST, you want to submit your startup to Product Hunt. The leaderboard resets every day, so this is the perfect time to maximize your chances. I would also go ahead and add this link to your product’s landing page so people from Hacker News and Reddit will also help on Product Hunt.

Your own audience

If you have any audience (a newsletter, an X account, an Instagram) post on there about the launch. Even with small accounts, you can still help your launch.

Platform 2: Hacker News

Go onto Hacker News, type in “SHOW HN: your product description in one sentence” in the title bar, and then a description in the description field.

I would do this immediately after your Product Hunt submission. Also, if your Hacker News post doesn’t take off, I would just hit a different URL on your website and submit again in a few hours (don’t keep spamming though).

Platform 3: Reddit

Hopefully you’ve gone ahead and scouted out the best subreddits ahead of time for promoting your product. Now go ahead and write and publish your posts (I’m not going to go into detail because launch strategy depends on the subreddit).

Platform 4: Indie Hackers

Indie Hackers is an article-based platform specifically for tech. Go ahead and publish an article on here. Try to include insights about building instead of just pure promotion.

Platform 5: Community-based

This is basically any chat-based option, like Discord, Slacks, etc. Essentially, just go ahead and send this out. Again, just like Reddit, be smart about where you send it and what the rules are in that server. For this one, if you continue it throughout the day and don’t get banned, you can truly change the outcome of your entire launch (but this one requires the most hustle).

Make sure to respond to any comments on your launch, fix any bugs that arise, etc. In general, make sure you have the whole day set aside for your launch.

By the end of the day, you should have gotten some form of traction. The beauty of doing all these platforms at once is they all help speed each other up. For example, someone on Reddit might see your project, upvote you on Reddit, but then go to your landing page and also upvote you on Product Hunt and Indie Hackers, and sign up.

If you want me to go into more detail about any of these platforms, I would love to. Just comment below.