Maxwell

I launched a product on Product Hunt for the first time today, and the experience has been very different from what I expected.

Before launching, I focused heavily on the product itself: making it useful, preparing the demo, screenshots, copy, and making sure everything was ready.

For the past 5 months ive spent a disproportionate part of my time building and improving my app and while i have considered how I will market the brand and brand tone of voice, personality what it represents, the actual execution of the marketing is where I am weakest in knowledge/experience. Particularly inexperienced in knowing what typically works and what doesn't.
Avenues Ive explored are:

• Typical social media reels/slideshows etc

• Discussion boards

• UGC (although have not actually tried it)

How is everyone typically distributing and promoting your product?

I launched a small price-comparison site at the end of July. It tracks current catalogs of guitar models from a handful of major brands and matches them against new stock at independent dealers roughly 1,250 models across 11 URLs (a home page with the comparison table, five brand pages, and the usual about/methodology/legal pages). Static HTML, no client-side framework. The one rule I built it around: no synthetic data if a price can't be kept fresh, it links out to a search instead of showing a number I made up.

Build side works. Discovery doesn't. Seven weeks in, a site: query returns nothing and Search Console shows 11 pages "Discovered currently not indexed" with 0 indexed. The sitemap was read successfully and all 11 URLs were discovered from it, so Google has known they exist since July.