Transcript
## **Was It Worth It?** Honestly, a fair question, especially as Product Hunt becomes increasingly distorted by teams chasing badges. For us, fighting a shadow ban all day made it even more exhausting. Let’s start with the goals. Our KPIs were brand awareness and user signups. On brand awareness - we got the badge. Checked. On signups - we launched on a Sunday intentionally (to make it SUN day, our product’s name), which means we missed out on most of Product Hunt’s organic weekday traffic. But we did get real followers and users from the communities we’d spent weeks building relationships with. Makers, builders, indie hackers - exactly our ICP. Goals met. But does that justify the drain? My answer is yes, especially for a small, early-stage team like us. Beyond the metrics, the launch generated team momentum and genuine user relationships. We are a team of perfectionists. I suspect many founders hesitate to launch because it feels like a massive operational lift, and nothing ever feels quite ready. What actually happened to us: preparing for the launch forced us to ship a new version of the product under real time pressure. It forced us to articulate what we’re building, which sharpened our roadmap. This is different from a pitch exercise or talking to investors. A launch is the most honest test we could run on our own product-market fit thinking. The launch created momentum. Feedback and bug reports kept us moving faster. And we are now genuinely connected with a community of builders and makers, and this is exactly the environment where we want to grow. The key is how you frame the exercise. We stopped seeing it as a distribution channel and started seeing it as a PMF testing channel, which is actually what Product Hunt was originally built for. Claude can be a good example: they launch on PH almost every other day, iterating in public, using the community as a signal. We see this as the right mindset. At the end of the day, users define our success, not badges. The goal is to build something people want. If a specific channel helps us figure that out faster, it is worth the effort.