Most launch checklists fail in one of two ways. They list a hundred items with no priorities, or they list ten items and pretend that's enough. The first overwhelms. The second leaves real work undone.
This checklist is thirty items, ordered. Ten before launch, ten on launch day, ten in the four weeks after. The order matters. Doing item twenty before item eight is how a launch fizzles.
Before launch (two to four weeks before ship day)
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Write the one-line description. Eight words. Who it's for, what it does, what's different. If the description still has filler at eight words in, the product positioning isn't tight enough to launch.
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Build a single-focus landing page. One headline, one sub-pitch, one CTA. No navigation. No competing offers. The page exists to convert launch traffic, nothing else.
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Produce the hero asset. A single gif, a single screenshot, or a thirty-second demo video. This is what people see first and is doing 60 to 80 percent of the work on every channel.
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Stage the launch announcement copy. Three versions: one for Product Hunt (180 characters), one for Show HN (one sentence), one for social media (a thread or carousel). Draft them all at least a week ahead.
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Set up product analytics. PostHog, Plausible, or your tool of choice. Configure the events you'll care about: signup, activation, key feature use. Test the events fire correctly before launch traffic hits.
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Stress-test the product. Run a synthetic load test with at least one hundred concurrent users on the critical paths. A launch that crashes at hour two of Product Hunt is one of the most painful failure modes available.
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Write the FAQ doc. A private document with answers to the twenty questions people will ask. Pricing, comparison to competitors, technical details, roadmap. Pulling answers from this doc during the launch is dramatically faster than composing each reply from scratch.
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Submit to one or two early directory listings. Beta-focused directories like BetaList or a permanent indie maker directory like Plug Your Build, submitted two to three weeks before launch. These create backlinks that improve domain authority before the launch traffic arrives.
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Identify the hand-DM list. Twenty to fifty specific people you'll personally message on launch day. Save the messages as drafts, customized per recipient. The send-time should be batch-friendly: thirty to sixty minutes to send all of them.
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Schedule the launch day. Tuesday or Wednesday tend to outperform Monday and Friday on Product Hunt. Avoid major industry events or holidays in the same week. Confirm the launch day fits the next two weeks of personal availability.
Launch day (a single tightly choreographed day)
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Submit to Product Hunt at 12:01 a.m. Pacific. The Product Hunt day starts at midnight Pacific. Submitting any later costs ranking momentum.
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Submit to Show HN between 8 and 10 a.m. Pacific. Different platform, different audience, different optimal time. Don't submit to both at the same hour and dilute attention.
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Post in Indie Hackers Products. Free. Three minutes of work. The traffic is modest but the comment engagement is high.
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Send the hand-DM batch. Personal messages to the twenty to fifty people on the list. Not a broadcast. Each message references something specific.
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Post in relevant subreddits. Only if the post format is community-appropriate (rules vary heavily, and rule violations get removed within an hour). r/SideProject for general indie work. r/SaaS for B2B. Niche subreddits if a clean fit exists.
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Post on the social channels. Twitter and LinkedIn at minimum. The hero asset plus a one-sentence pitch plus a link. Don't make this the marketing strategy; treat it as one channel among many.
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Engage every Product Hunt comment for the first six hours. The algorithm weights comment velocity heavily. A launch with thirty real comments in the first hour outperforms one with two hundred upvotes and silence.
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Send a personalized email to every signup. A real one. From a real address. Asking what brought them to the product and what they want to try. Conversion from these emails to active use is dramatically higher than from automated drips.
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Monitor analytics live. Errors, drop-off points, conversion funnel. Anything broken needs to be fixed within the hour or it bleeds the launch.
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Take notes on every question asked. Every Product Hunt comment, every email reply, every Twitter response. These notes become the next two months of content, FAQ improvements, and feature priorities.
After launch (the four weeks that turn a spike into a baseline)
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Submit to the long tail of directories. Two or three per week for the following four weeks. Each submission compounds the SEO and adds a steady drip of qualified visitors.
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Write the launch debrief. A public post one week after launch: what worked, what didn't, the numbers. Indie Hackers and a personal blog are the right places. This post often outperforms the launch itself for ongoing traffic.
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Reach out to small podcasts. Niche podcasts in the product's category accept guest pitches more readily than makers expect. Five pitched, one accepted, one episode published is a typical realistic conversion. The episode itself produces ongoing trickle traffic.
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Begin a content marketing cadence. One substantive piece per week, published on a Google-indexable destination, written for searchers in the product's category. This is the channel that compounds.
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Email all signups in week two. A follow-up: what they did, what they didn't, an invitation to a fifteen-minute call for feedback. The call invitation alone produces a 5 to 10 percent response rate from engaged signups.
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Identify the top ten most-engaged users. From analytics, signups, or comment threads. These are the proto-evangelists. Send each of them a personal note thanking them and asking what they'd want to see next.
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Set up a public roadmap or changelog. A simple page (Notion, Linear, a static page) that shows what shipped recently and what's planned next. Reduces support load and signals product velocity to prospects.
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Submit to specialist directories. Directories specific to the product's category, niche, or technology stack. Search "[category] directory" on Google. The page-one results are where to submit.
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Run a thirty-day post-launch review. Was the launch real or noise? Real means: signups continue at higher-than-pre-launch rates, retention week over week is improving, and at least one acquisition channel besides the launch itself is producing measurable traffic. Noise means none of those.
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Decide on the next phase. Iteration on the existing audience, a second launch on a different platform, or a pivot. The data from items eleven through twenty-nine answers this. Skipping the explicit decision is how products drift.
How to actually use this
Print it. Or save it as a doc with checkboxes. Working through thirty items from memory is harder than it sounds when launch day is going.
The discipline isn't the checklist. The discipline is finishing items one through ten before launch and items twenty-one through thirty after. The middle ten happen automatically on launch day for any maker awake and engaged. The pre and post items are the work that compounds. They're also the work that gets skipped.
Launches that compound into sustainable traffic do all thirty. Launches that spike and die finish ten or fifteen. The difference shows up at the ninety-day mark.
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