The honest version of our Product Hunt launch is that we did not out-build anyone that day. We out-distributed them.
It was a Vercel day on Product Hunt. When a company that size ships, the whole board bends around them and everything else turns into background noise. We launched into that anyway.
What we did was unglamorous. We showed up and stayed up, all day, on Product Hunt and on Twitter, answering every comment and every question about how this was different from the other thing. Not one blast at nine in the morning and silence after. We finished #1 Product of the Day, and then #1 Product of the Week.
The lesson I keep coming back to is that distribution you built (a repo people actually use, a Discord people actually talk in) survives someone bigger showing up on your launch day. Distribution you rented doesn’t.
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