Where to launch your product in 2026

Ask three questions of every channel before you put it on your list:

• Are your users there? A tool for developers and a tool for wedding photographers belong in different places. Search the channel for products like yours and see whether anyone responded.
• Does your product meet its rules? Several channels reject landing pages, waitlists and whole categories of product. Read the rules before you write anything.
• What does it cost you? Some need a full day of answering comments. Some need weeks of taking part beforehand. Some need five minutes and a logo.

Three or four channels done properly will tell you more than twenty done in a rush. Before any of them, work through the launch checklist, since every channel sends people to the same site.

Good for: software that people who follow new tech products might use, and feedback from other makers.

What it asks: a product that works on the day, a personal account, a page with a short tagline and at least one image, and your presence for a day that starts at 12:01 AM Pacific Time (Product Hunt launch guide). Launching is free, and you can post your own product (How Product Hunt works).

What to know: Product Hunt’s team hand-picks which launches appear on the homepage leaderboard, and calls that an editorial decision (What kind of products get featured). A launch that isn’t featured stays live and reachable by its link, but it isn’t on that leaderboard. Asking for upvotes is against the rules. Asking for feedback is encouraged (How to promote your launch).

Suits: finished, visually clear products. It’s a poor fit for closed betas and for products whose buyers don’t read tech sites. The full picture is in whether Product Hunt is worth it without an audience.

Good for: technical products, developer tools, open source, and anything with an interesting story about how it was built.

What it asks: “something you’ve made that other people can play with”. Blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters and landing pages are off topic, and the rules ask you to make it easy to try, ideally without signups or emails (Show HN rules). You’re expected to be around to discuss it.

What to know: the FAQ says asking people to upvote or comment is not allowed, and that Hacker News penalises or bans submissions, accounts and sites that break the rule (HN FAQ). A moderator’s advice, linked from the rules page, is to drop anything that sounds like marketing or sales and use factual, direct language (Show HN tips).

Suits: makers who can talk about the technical side and take blunt feedback. If your product can’t be tried without a sales call, skip it. See how to write a Show HN post.

Good for: reaching people by interest. There are communities for most trades, hobbies and tools, which makes Reddit useful for products that general tech audiences ignore.

What it asks: that you follow each community’s own rules. Reddit says promotional content is not inherently spam, but that some communities disallow it entirely and others limit it to a small share of your activity there (Reddit Help for moderators). Moderators decide what’s unwanted in their community.

What to know: the first example on Reddit’s own list of spam is “Mass-posting repetitive content for the purpose of exposure or financial gain” (Reddit Help: Spam). Pasting one launch post into ten communities is that. One post, written for one community you already take part in, is the approach that fits the rules.

Suits: makers who are already members of the relevant communities, or who are willing to become one before launch. See how to launch on Reddit without getting banned.

Good for: a permanent page about your product on someone else’s site, usually with a link to yours, and on the more active boards some visitors and votes during a launch window.

What they ask: a name, tagline, description, logo and screenshots. Some ask for more: a badge on your site, a payment to skip a queue, or a link back. Read the terms before you submit.

What to know: quality varies widely. Where a directory has no visitors, the link is the only thing you get. Check three recent listings for comments or votes from real people, and run one through the backlink checker to see what kind of link it gives. The guide on judging launch directories has the full set of checks, and badges for backlinks covers that trade.

Suits: almost every product, as a low-effort addition. IndieTide, which publishes this guide, is one of these: a weekly launch board where each product gets a permanent page linking to the maker’s site, with no badge required for the link. Judge it by the same checks as the rest. Our list of launch directories is a starting point.

X

On X, a launch is a post from your own account, and the first people to see it are the ones who already follow you. It suits makers who have been posting about the product as they built it. If you’re starting from nothing, treat X as a place to keep a public record and talk to other makers, and don’t count on it for launch-day visitors. See building in public.

Niche communities

Forums, Slack and Discord groups, and trade communities for the people you built the product for. They’re small, but everyone in them is a potential user. Each has its own rules on sharing your work, and the same approach as Reddit applies: take part first, read the rules, ask a moderator if unsure, and write the post for that group.

Newsletters

Newsletters that cover your niche reach people who chose to hear about tools like yours. Write a short personal email to the editor: one line on what the product does, one on why their readers would care, and a link. Some newsletters also sell sponsored slots. That’s a normal ad purchase, and you can judge it by the visitors it sends. Add a UTM parameter such as ?utm_source=newsletter-name to the link so you can tell.

Launching everywhere on one day means answering nobody properly. Spreading it out also lets each round of feedback improve the product before the next audience sees it.

1. Weeks before: join the communities you plan to post in and take part. Check each channel’s rules against your product. Fix the site.
2. First: people who already know you. Friends, past colleagues, early users, any list you have. They find the obvious bugs. If you have no such people, see launching with no audience.
3. Then one niche community or subreddit. Small, relevant, forgiving. Fix what they point out.
4. Then the day-long ones, on separate days. Show HN and Product Hunt each need you present for hours, so don’t schedule them together. Do whichever fits your product better first.
5. Then directories and boards, a few at a time over the following weeks. Keep a log of where you submitted and the listing URLs.
6. Then newsletters and X, once you have something to show: a number, a testimonial, a write-up of the launch.

Tag the links you post yourself so your analytics can separate the channels, and write down what each one sent. A quiet first round is recoverable. What to do after a quiet launch covers the next steps, and relaunching covers going back to a channel later.