I’ve now launched 11 products on Product Hunt. Of those launches, only one of them got real traction. Graphite blew up when it was launched. It was my first product and it was one of the few products submitted to Product Hunt where I was not the submitter (there could be some algorithmic preference to products posted by random people and not the makers).

My most recent product launch came this past week. Perligo never even cracked the fold. The thing is, the launch matters, but not that much. In fact, I launched Perligo knowing full-well that after my alpha and beta period there were still a lot of problems. During testing, users did not validate the product as is, but gave me the feedback I needed to push it in the right direction. Still, I launched.

Not launching is the easy thing, but it becomes contagious. You don’t launch because you’re worried you need to fix X. Well, you fix X and then you get some feedback on Y. So you still don’t launch. Eventually, you look back and realize you’ve been building the app for two years or more and have not launched.

That’s why it’s important to me to just get products out there. The app, in its current state, works really well. However, it serves a very niche audience. I learned what I need to do to expand its reach into something more viable, but I didn’t want to wait to implement those changes.

So I launched, and it flopped. So what? I still have to build. I still have to hustle. I still have to sell. All of that would have been true whether I had a huge launch or not.

Don’t let your launch define your product. You define your product. Your users define your product.