Founders! What would be a more important metric to judge a PH launch success than upvotes? If any.

If i were to launch on PH, number of active users would be my north star.

Whatever you think the KPI is, set it and execute toward it. Many will say that upvote doesnt matter, but it matters A LOT, because Upvotes are the currency on Product Hunt. Upvotes will put you on the map, and it will drive traffic to your website. Sure, account creation, user engagements, paid accounts, are obvious choices, but if you are to launch on PH, focus on the upvotes.

I would say traffic to our product and conversion of visitors to users :)

I would say Traffic to our product and feedback from visitors. We didn't get the outstanding upvote success of some products, but the traffic & feedback were really valuable, and that's what we really wanted, so we were quite happy at the end of the day (and subsequent weeks to come)!

Conversion to purchase :) If you can, set some funnel in some apps from website visits - sign-up - subscription. The upvotes or comments are helpful but it's really about your product and what's the conversion rate.

I think upvotes only help you to be mentioned between other products. Fo me more important the number of real users who started using the product