"First of all no matter what you launch, if you hope that you simply put your submission out there, and it will end up in the top 5 of the day, most certainly this is not going to happen. If you wanna get there, you have to come up with a plan to promote your listing and get the upvotes." - so, it looks like that was (at least partially) wrong.
Why would you think that it's not possible to launch it more or less organically? It's definitely possible here on HN, why would PH should be very different?
At the very end - don't focus on promoting that much, especially artificially, build the product people love and you get your front page.
It's definitely possible organically, but if I can increase the chances of this happening, why not do it?
"Not focusing on promoting" is not an option if you start a product and nobody knows it even exists. You gotta take some actions to reach out to potential customers.
Obviously artificially doing it isn't the way, I guess we misjudged what "artificially" means for PH - that's the point of the blog post as well.
It's possible to have a nice launch at HN, but whether or not that's going to translate into much value is another question. If you have a really great product that everyone just loves, and it's free (or free to try), and it's built for viral growth - then getting to the top spot at HN might jump start things for you.
But to anyone who doesn't manage to get any traction on HN or PH, I wouldn't worry about it too much - it's one of those things that's nice if it happens but you shouldn't be counting on it in your business plan.
Thank you for this. As a new maker, I am trying to understand the market and how things work. My product has b2b and b2c (free) offerings and I would like to hope that it’s useful. But you are right, making it here should not be the main point of the business plan.
Why would you think that it's not possible to launch it more or less organically? It's definitely possible here on HN, why would PH should be very different?
At the very end - don't focus on promoting that much, especially artificially, build the product people love and you get your front page.