A common plan for launching a side project: put up a waitlist page, post it to Show HN, Product Hunt and BetaList, and let the signups come in. Two of those three have rules that get in the way before launch, and the third changed how pre-launch works in 2025.
I make a waitlist tool, Waitlister, and one of the rules below applies to pages built with it.
Show HN: wait until there's something to try
Show HN is for things people can try. The Show HN guidelines list sign-up pages as off-topic, and a waitlist page is a sign-up page. Hold the post until people can use what you built.
Product Hunt: Coming Soon pages are gone, so schedule instead
Product Hunt retired its "Coming Soon" pages on August 28, 2025, so older launch guides that tell you to set one up are out of date. What you can do now is schedule the launch up to 30 days ahead. People can follow the product and get notified when it goes live.
Launches tend to go better with supporters who already know it's coming. So Product Hunt amplifies a list you already have, and it fits near the end of pre-launch.
BetaList: your own domain, and a page that doesn't look like a template
BetaList features startups that haven't launched yet, so it's the one of the three where a waitlist page fits. It asks for a custom-designed landing page with a signup form on your own domain, and it turns down template pages and free subdomains.
This is the rule that applies to Waitlister pages. A hosted waitlist page on the tool's own domain (on Waitlister that's waitlister.me/p/your-page) won't qualify: BetaList requires your own domain, and its guidelines also turn down pages hosted by landing-page services. The route that fits is a page you design on your own domain, with the signup form embedded in it. On Waitlister, the embeddable form is on every plan, including free.
Before you qualify for any of them
All three do more when people are already paying attention. Getting that attention costs time more than money, and three things work with no audience:
- Write to people who have the problem, one message per person. Ask what they make of the problem before you bring up the waitlist. Some will join, and the replies tell you whether the problem bothers them as much as it bothers you.
- Answer questions where your future users ask for help, often a subreddit or a forum for their trade. Read the rules first, since many communities restrict self-promotion, especially from new accounts.
- Get featured where your users already read or listen. A niche newsletter whose readers are mostly your kind of user usually does more than a big general one.
If your users are developers, building in public fits too, though the following grows slowly, over months. Build-in-public posts mostly reach other builders. That's the right crowd for a developer tool, and a weak one for, say, scheduling software for dentists.
I wrote up twelve pre-launch strategies, sorted by how much audience each one needs, here: Pre-launch marketing strategies, sorted by audience.
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