Maintaining control of your launch is important as well. I recall seeing discussion on Product Hunt recently where founders were worried about their product be

Maintaining control of your launch is important as well. I recall seeing discussion on Product Hunt recently where founders were worried about their product being submitted without their knowledge, effectively launching them before they're ready in a beta/soft launch state. Obviously that would be bad, but it's potentially even worse, because (as far as I know) you only get one shot at Product Hunt. If this has actually happened or not, I'm not sure. There were a lot of founders worried about it though. Per the discussion, I believe rrhoover said they're looking into ways to address that, and the prevailing consensus was to lock down your beta. Some other ideas were additional provisions in beta tester NDAs, and Product Hunt implementing some type of blacklist system to prevent premature submissions. Personally I would just have a bare minimum public-facing website during beta, though it seems that this would inhibit your ability to get beta users unless you're either well connected or your product is hyped. Of course, this same phenomenon has been happening with HN for years now, the difference being it's much more rare because HN isn't laser-focused on new products, and its submission volume is massive.