product hunt starts at 12:01am pacific and i'm in europe — stay up or schedule it and sleep

Do the timezone arithmetic before you dread anything, because it works in your favour and almost nobody points this out.

12:01am Pacific in summer is a bit after 9am in central Europe. So the moment the day opens, you are awake, showered and at a keyboard. The first six hours of the cycle, which is the part everyone tells you matters, is your morning.

What you actually lose is the far end. Pacific afternoon and evening, when a big chunk of the US audience turns up and most comments arrive, is roughly 11pm to 8am for you. That is the part to plan for. What worked for me: full attention 9am to 11pm local, sleep, then get up around 5am for the last few hours because that is when the ordering settles.

So you are not choosing between sleep and launch. You are choosing which end of the day to be tired for.

Politely against the grain here: the audience on that site is mostly other makers. If you sell to physios, accountants, warehouse managers or anyone whose job is not building software, you are launching to people who will be enthusiastic and will never pay you.

Still worth doing once, for the link and the social proof and because it costs you a day. Just do not schedule your emotional wellbeing around it and do not clear a week for follow up that will not come.

Set expectations with numbers so the day cannot disappoint you.

A mid table finish sent me roughly thirteen hundred visits over three days, forty seven signups and three of those turned into paying accounts within the month. That is a decent week, not a business changing event.

The top slot on a busy day is generally in the high hundreds to well over a thousand upvotes, and those come from people who already have an audience. Building your plan around ranking first is building it around something you do not control. Build it around the tail instead: the backlink, the badge on your site, the reviews you can quote for the next two years, and the email list you collect on the day.

First launch was two months ago and the prep list is what saved me, so here it is in the order I did it.

Gallery images exported at the sizes they ask for, not resized in the browser, because the compression is visible. First comment written and edited two days before, saying who it is for and what it does not do yet. A short note to my list that went out the morning of, not the night before. Every comment answered within about an hour all day, which was the single most time consuming part.

The thing I nearly got wrong: asking people directly for upvotes. Do not. Asking for a look is fine, asking for votes is against the rules and the pattern is detectable. Tell people it is live and let them decide.

Schedule it, sleep normally the night before, keep the whole day clear for replying. Nobody has ever won a launch by being conscious at 12:01.