As Steve Jobs says, simple can be harder than complex.

This seems obvious, but lack of sleep is a pitfall teams run into with product launches all the time. You scramble to get last-second things done and then launch with little gas in the tank.

It will be thrilling to get those first up-votes and comments, but the real activity picks up when the East coasters hear the alarm, roll over, and start their day on the right foot by opening their Product Hunt app.

They’re a group of tech early-adopters who are taking the time to comment on your post — be around to answer their questions and concerns immediately.

If you have a Twitter account for your product, even with a small following, engage with anyone tweeting about your product actively. Product Hunt originally required users to sign up with their Twitter accounts so the community is generally very active there.

Tip: Make sure you have a way for people to know you’re listening to their requests and concerns. We ended up keeping a doc of all feature requests and converting it into a public facing feature request board via Product Pains.

Offer your users instant gratification in your product. Preferably in as many areas as possible and as soon as possible (including your Product Hunt comments thread).

Understand the real value your product offers and align that with your singularly focused objective.

Know where your focus for the business is, what value your product offers and you’ll prevent shooting yourself (and your strategic objective) in the foot.

Product launches are great for spikes in traffic and growth, but you need to make sure you have formed some hypotheses around how people will use the product and test those hypotheses.

Most people launch products on Product Hunt to drive initial growth to their platform but if you take the time to optimize for sustained growth you can get multiplier effect on the value you get from Product Hunt traffic.

Most importantly make sure you’re engaging with the community in real time!