Things I did before app launch and what I wish I had done
sagiodev.com
sagiodev.com
in generally for OP's stuff i would disagree on launching on product hunt first. PH is a giant pyramid scheme where people just compete for the #1 badge each day. what the most successful products do is launch everywhere else first, and then after a few months email their happy customers to support them on PH. this is why you are #20 because you didnt study the game
Do you find your customers are dedicated enough to create a Product Hunt account for you, or do they happen to already have one?
On the other hand "Please upvote me on ${website}! And get a free yearly subscription" could work, but it's going to make your product look cheap.
Exceptions exist, like social networks where you can do stunts until it grows itself, or ads when you have the rest figured out or lots of VC $... but good to only do if you have to.
Importantly, we don't compete in the Marketplaces for advertising, just work with them for final purchasing, and what our bigger users really like, easier self-hosting POCing. (Infinite trial, even.)
For channels, we instead work with graph databases (Neo4j, Neptune, ...), security/IT log systems (Splunk, ...), AI framework providers (Nvidia, ...), and federal partners so as their communities want to answer graph-y questions about their data easily, they know we do cool GPU graph viz and now graph autoML. Our demo blogposts, talks, notebooks, streamlit apps, etc, are useful tutorials for how to do these. At this point, we are lucky enough to have built a small community as well. Even in the case of Marketplaces, we do collaborate with those companies... But then database teams whom we help create more complete (complementary) offerings.
So the question is who are your communities, which depends on your app.
Btw, if interesting to anyone, we are hiring infra + backend :)
I'd get it for a product aimed at builders but otherwise...
Do you develop apps on the side or do you make a living with them?