Where to Launch Your Startup Online (Besides Product Hunt)
A launch day is a spike. Here's the honest list of where that spike turns into customers who stick around.
Product Hunt is the default answer to "where do I launch my startup," and it's a reasonable one, real traffic, a real community of early adopters, and a badge worth having. It's also one day of one spike, and most founders discover that the traffic from launch day converts far worse than the traffic that trickles in afterward from somewhere that keeps indexing and keeps showing up in search. Here's the honest list of where else to put a launch, and what each place is actually good for.
Product Hunt (the baseline, for comparison)
Good for: a concentrated spike of traffic, early feedback from a product-literate audience, and a badge that's a mild trust signal afterward. Not good for: anything beyond launch day. Once you're off the front page, the listing gets almost no further traffic, and Product Hunt visitors skew toward other founders and builders rather than your actual buyers, which matters if your product isn't aimed at that audience.
Hacker News
Good for: technical products and developer tools specifically. A well-received Show HN post can drive a real spike and, unlike Product Hunt, Hacker News threads sometimes keep getting referenced and linked for years. Not good for: consumer products, or anything that reads as marketing rather than a genuine "I built this" post, since this community is unusually sensitive to anything that smells like a pitch. A thin or sales-y Show HN post gets buried fast and can sour the audience on a second attempt.
Indie Hackers
Good for: a smaller, more founder-dense audience that's genuinely supportive of early-stage products and willing to give real feedback, not just traffic. It's a good place for an honest build-in-public post, not just a launch announcement. Not good for: volume. It's a much smaller audience than Product Hunt or Reddit, useful for feedback and peer support more than for a traffic spike.
Relevant subreddits
Good for: everything the other launch sites on this list aren't: ongoing, compounding reach instead of a one-day spike. A genuinely useful post or reply in the right subreddit keeps getting found through Google and LLM citations for months or years afterward, see why Reddit outranks your SaaS on Google and how to get cited by ChatGPT starting on Reddit for why that long tail matters more than it looks like it should on day one. Not good for: a single big-bang launch moment. Reddit punishes anything that reads as a coordinated launch announcement, and a brand-new account's first post being "I launched my startup" reads exactly like the spam it resembles. See how to warm up a Reddit account before trying this, since it needs weeks of lead time a Product Hunt launch doesn't.
BetaList and similar pre-launch directories
Good for: building an early waitlist before you're ready for a full launch, and reaching people specifically looking for early-access products. Not good for: meaningful volume on their own, these work best as one small input alongside other channels, not a primary strategy.
Niche, topic-specific communities (Discord, Slack groups, forums)
Good for: reaching a tightly defined audience that general launch sites miss entirely, a specific professional community, a niche hobby forum, a Slack group for a particular job function. These often convert better than any general launch site, precisely because the audience is already pre-qualified by being in that specific space. Not good for: discovery, you have to already know where your specific audience gathers, which usually means doing the research covered in using Reddit for market research first.
The honest comparison
| Channel | Volume | Compounds over time | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product Hunt | High, one day | No | A concentrated spike and a badge |
| Hacker News | Medium, one spike | Somewhat | Developer tools, technical products |
| Indie Hackers | Low | Somewhat | Feedback and peer support |
| Low per post, many posts possible | Yes, strongly | Ongoing reach, LLM and Google citation | |
| Niche communities | Low but highly qualified | Somewhat | A specific, well-understood audience |
A realistic sequence, not a single choice
- Start Reddit account warmup and market research weeks before any planned launch date, since it's the only channel on this list with real lead time.
- Use BetaList or a similar directory to build an early waitlist while the product is still rough.
- Launch on Product Hunt (and Hacker News, if the product fits) for the spike, badge, and initial feedback.
- Keep showing up in relevant Reddit threads and niche communities afterward, since this is the channel that's still working six months later, long after the Product Hunt spike is a line in an old changelog.
See building is easy, selling is hard for the fuller picture of what happens after launch day, once the spike fades and the actual work of finding customers starts.
The one channel on this list that keeps paying off is also the one that takes the most ongoing attention to do well. ThreadyGo surfaces the Reddit conversations where someone's already asking for what you built, so the ongoing half of this doesn't require reading hundreds of threads by hand. Try it for $9 to see it against your own product.