product hunt launches all go live at 12:01am pacific - do i have to be awake at 8am in europe or is that a myth

Your timezone is the good one and people will not tell you that. The window opening at 09:01 local means you start your launch day awake, caffeinated and at a desk, while founders on the US west coast are choosing between launching at midnight and sleeping through the first six hours.

What to do with the hours: reply to every comment within a few minutes, in full sentences, like a person. That is the actual work. Not upvote begging, not DMs, not the group chats - comments, because they are the visible part and because the people who leave them are the ones who might become users.

Second most useful thing is having your own list and your own communities lined up to arrive throughout the day rather than all in the first hour. Steady beats spiky, and a completely flat line after 10am looks exactly like what it is.

Set expectations on the traffic before you plan anything around it. Placing well sends a spike of curious visitors, not buyers, and the conversion rate from that audience is typically far below your normal traffic because most of them are other makers.

My own numbers: a mid-table finish produced a visible spike on the day, a smaller tail for about three days, and then nothing. The number of paying customers directly attributable was small and I would not have called it a good use of the two weeks I spent preparing, judged on revenue alone.

Judged on other things - a permanent backlink, a page that shows up when people search the product name, and half a dozen genuinely useful pieces of feedback in the comments - it was fine. Just do not build a financial plan on it.

Day of week matters more than hour of day in my experience. Midweek is more crowded and more trafficked, weekends are quieter both ways. If your goal is feedback rather than a badge, a quiet day is genuinely better, and if your goal is the badge, you are competing with whoever else picked that day, which you cannot see in advance.

Nobody outside the company knows the ranking weights and everyone writing a playbook is guessing from correlations. Treat every specific claim about the algorithm, including confident ones with numbers in them, as folklore.

The things that are actually documented: fixed start time, 24 hour window, and rules against soliciting votes. Optimise for the documented parts and ignore the rest.

You can schedule the launch in advance rather than staying up to submit it, which removes the only genuinely timezone-dependent part of the process. Everything after that is you being awake and responsive, and you are awake at 09:01.

The preparation that actually paid off for me: assets finished a week early, the first comment written and edited while calm, and a short list of people told a few days beforehand that it was happening on a specific date. Not asked for anything. Just told.

Practical thing that saved me: pre-write the first comment, the maker intro, and three or four likely answers, before the day. At 09:01 you will be too wired to write anything coherent, and the first comment sets the tone for everything after it.