Using Product Hunt/Ship to validate content product ideas

Hello - we started using the Ship from Product Hunt's Pro plan a few months ago. We wanted to try out the promotion to the PH community and see what sort of traction we got from it. While the Ship product itself leaves a lot to be desired, the exposure to the PH community has been pretty good for us. Lots of early adopters found us through the Upcoming Products section.

The nice thing is you can promote multiple projects (the limit is two, which they don't tell you in the UI). So we began using it to post other little content product ideas. For example, our checklist for launching on Product Hunt (success), our State of the Stack survey idea (fail), and various other ideas.

It's actually turned out to be really helpful for us. It lets us validate content ideas while building an audience for them. You can gauge interest by how many people subscribe and share before actually committing to work on something.

A few drawbacks we've seen:

1. There are lots of spam signups - though these seem to come in waves
2. It's hard to really gauge engagement - clicking subscribe is very different than being really interested in something
3. The Ship product itself is sort of buggy and hard to use

I wrote up more info here if you're interested in trying it out.

Anyone else using Ship? Thoughts?