Launch window

The launch window is the bounded period in which a listing is active on a directory’s feed. Its length follows the directory’s cadence: one day on daily platforms, several days to a week on weekly ones, a month on monthly ones.

Windows usually open at a fixed boundary rather than whenever a maker is ready. Product Hunt’s day begins at 12:01 AM Pacific. Uneed publishes its daily batch at midnight Pacific. Weekly platforms typically open on Monday. Entering at the start of a window rather than near its end is one of the few pieces of launch timing that reliably matters, because the whole window’s audience sees the listing rather than the tail of it.

What happens inside the window is temporary: ranking, vote counts, homepage placement and leaderboard positions all belong to it. What survives it is the permanent listing page, which keeps its structured content, its internal links from category and platform hubs, and its outbound link.

Several directories attach durable consequences to window performance, most commonly the link attribute. Read those rules before the window opens rather than during it, since there is rarely anything you can do about them once the clock is running.