How long did you work on your startup project before you launched on PH?

@williamz902 I've been working on my project for about a year now but I haven't launched in on PH yet. My plan is to at some point but, no offense to PH, my "core users" may not necessarily be PH users. I'm targeting runners so Ive been trying to reach out to them directly and look at those channels. But! In saying all that, I definitely need to learn more about business and getting a product to market as you say. I think it's a cross between "being embarrassed by the first version" and "not making a crappy first version." I know my app crashes right now and if I gave it to users I would be very embarrassed...so that does that mean I should launch it? Definitely not. It is a journey though as you say, definitely with ups and downs. I'm just now getting back into it after almost a month of complete burnout. I'm not back 100% but these kind of things have ups and downs. I would say the journey has 100% been worth it though just for what I've learned along the way and the people I've been able to engage with.

@williamz902 for me "if you are not embarrassed ..." means that it could be ugly, lack of fancy animations and additional features, but the core functions should work 80-90% of the time and users should be able to use it despite its ugliness :D I used to be the guy who doesn't launch until it's perfect, but I realized how many of my projects ended up in the "drawer" because of this. Most of the time, when I felt something was ready, the next day I found something cool to implement. Neverending story 🎶 Now, I always have a deadline for my projects. This way, there is a point when I should say, no more features because I'll miss the deadline. The date of the deadline is up to me, but I'm trying not to give myself too much freedom :) For me, Product Hunt is a great place to validate an idea because (in most cases) I'm sure that there are users here from my target group. But I'm also sure that this is not the case for every idea. To answer your question, I worked between 4 to 2 weeks before launch something here. The funny thing is that at the moment, the products I worked on less were more successful.

@williamz902 It will be six years before it goes live to PH (imminent). We launched it 3 years ago and I was embarrassed by it—so much so that I turned off all marketing efforts and went back to work with my co-founder. We're bootstrapped, so it gets done in the margins.

@williamz902 I think that's the wrong question to ask. Every business has a set assumptions or hypotheses that need to be tested, as soon as possible. If you can test some using PH, great. But it's just one method. We launched Focusmate on PH because we were running a crowdfunding campaign and the bump in eyeballs was especially useful at the time.