Launch Guide

Most launches fail on preparation, not on launch day. This is what actually moves the needle, in rough order of impact.

Before you submit

Write 800+ words of genuine explanation. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do. A product page with a real story — what was broken, what you tried, what you deliberately left out — ranks. A page with a tagline and a screenshot does not, no matter how good the product is. Write it in the story field, in Markdown.

Get your tagline right. It becomes your meta description and the first line anyone reads in a search result. Say what the product does, not what it is. "Your calendar, rewritten every morning" beats "The AI-powered productivity platform for modern teams" by a wide margin.

Add the UneedLists badge if you want a do-follow link. Paste the snippet on your homepage or footer, then hit verify. No badge means the listing still goes to review, with a nofollow outbound link.

Write your FAQs. Five real questions you actually get asked. They render on the page and feed FAQPage structured data, which is one of the few rich results still widely shown.

Upload real screenshots with real alt text. They enter the image sitemap and become an independent discovery channel. "Dashboard showing weekly revenue movements" is alt text; "screenshot" is not.

Choosing a launch day

Tuesday to Thursday, early morning UTC. Weekend launches get fewer votes because fewer people are around, and the trending algorithm has a four-hour grace period before decay begins — so a launch at 07:00 UTC has the whole working day to accumulate votes before it starts to decay.

Avoid launching the same week as a major industry conference unless your product is about that conference.

Launch day

Tell the people who already care first. Your existing users, your newsletter, the Slack or Discord where people already know you. Twenty votes from people who genuinely use the product beats two hundred from a vote-swap group — and the vote-swap group will get you banned.

Reply to every comment. Founder replies are badged, and a thread with real answers in it is a meaningfully better page than one without. It also feeds the DiscussionForumPosting structured data.

Do not buy votes or organise vote rings. Self-voting is blocked in the database. Coordinated voting is detectable in the audit log, and the penalty is removal of the votes and usually the listing.

After launch

Ship a changelog entry every few weeks. Each one updates the page's dateModified, appears in the "recently updated" feed on the homepage, and gives crawlers a reason to come back. It also builds your launch streak. During launch week, the product sits on the homepage leaderboard.

Fill in your alternatives. Naming honest alternatives generates a page targeting " alternatives" — a high-intent query where the searcher already has budget. Being the page that answers it is more valuable than being absent from it.

Keep your founder profile current. It is competing for your own name, permanently. That is the asset with the longest half-life of anything here.

What not to bother with

Launch-day traffic spikes. They feel good and are gone by Thursday. The pages that matter are the ones still sending traffic in eighteen months: your product page, your founder page, your alternatives page, and the week archive that permanently links to all three.