The product launch checklist

Every directory, store listing and social post asks for this line. Writing it once, properly, saves you writing it badly twenty times under time pressure.

If you cannot name the person, you cannot choose the places to launch or the words to use when you get there.

Launch traffic is the cheapest attention you will ever get. People who arrive knowing the price convert better than free users you ask for money later.

Skip if you are shipping something you have decided will always be free.

A launch with nobody to tell depends entirely on strangers finding you on the day. Even thirty names give day one a floor.

Skip if you already reach the audience, for example through an existing product or community.

Store review, scheduled directory slots and your own asset list all take time you have to book rather than find. A date is what makes the rest of this list finite.

You have never seen your own product the way a new user does. A clean browser and an email address you have not used before will find the step that is broken.

Launch day produces a lot of noise. Decide in advance which number tells you it worked, so you are not reading traffic charts for a week.

The first hour of real traffic finds bugs your own testing did not. You want them arriving in a list you can rank, not in support email.

Mail from a shared sender lands in spam, and a signup that never receives its verification is a signup lost.

App stores, many directories and most business buyers will not list you or buy from you without them.

Two reachable versions of your site split your search signals, and a certificate warning ends the visit before the page loads.

These are the words people read in search results and in shared links. Without them the browser and the search engine guess for you.

Most of your launch links get shared in a chat window. A blank preview reads as broken, a clear one gets opened.

It is the only thing identifying your tab among the twenty others someone has open.

They tell search engines which pages to read and which to leave alone, which matters most in the weeks when you are first being indexed.

Broken links happen at launch more than at any other time, because other people are writing about you. Send those visitors somewhere instead of nowhere.

Roughly half your launch traffic arrives on a phone, often on a poor connection, and usually from a link someone tapped in passing.

This is how you later find out which queries and which listings actually sent you people.

A growing share of buyers ask an assistant before they open a search engine. If your pages are unreadable to an agent, or your claims are not stated in plain text, you are missing from the answer it gives.

Directories check that it works, buyers use it, and it is often the only route a serious enquiry has to you.

Almost every listing asks for one or the other, and cropping a wide logo into a square while filling in a form looks exactly like what it is.

People decide from screenshots before they read a word. Show the product mid-task with real content, not the empty state.

A fifteen second loop answers "what is this" faster than any paragraph you could write.

Skip if your product is a library or a command line tool where a code sample reads better than a video.

You will paste these dozens of times. Writing them once keeps the story identical wherever someone meets it.

On most launch platforms the maker's first comment is the second thing people read, and it is the only place the reason gets to be personal.

The price, the privacy, the obvious competitor, the missing feature and why not just use the big one. Answer them before they are asked in public.

Most platforms only take certain kinds of product. Filtering first saves you a week of submissions that were never going to be accepted.

Many directories want a link or a badge back before they will list you. Decide where it goes before you are halfway through a form.

Submissions take longer than the forms suggest. Budget the hours, and use one email address you can search later.

The platforms that queue launches are the ones with real audiences. If you wait, your slot lands weeks after the rest of your launch.

Listings are worth doing for the traffic and the social proof. Treat any SEO value as a bonus rather than the reason.

It can be the biggest single day of traffic you get, or a day of votes from people who will never buy. The decision is about who your buyer is, not about the platform.

Skip if you sell only to enterprise buyers.

These are the only people who have already said yes. They are the cheapest first users you will ever have, and they came before the launch did.

One post where your users already read beats five posts on platforms you joined for launch day.

Threads are ranked by activity on most launch platforms, and a maker answering questions in public is the best sales page you have.

This is the largest group of people who wanted your product and then hit something. One honest email recovers a surprising share of them.

Five conversations tell you more about what to fix than a thousand pageviews will.

The week after launch is when goodwill is highest and the ask is easiest, and those quotes go on to do a lot of work on your site.

Launch week hands you a ranked bug list for free. Shipping the top three, visibly, is what turns visitors into users.

Real numbers get read and shared, and the post keeps earning attention long after the launch itself is over.

Skip if your numbers are commercially sensitive or your buyers are enterprise.

Without this you repeat all of it next time. With it you know the three places that were worth the effort.

Those pages are read by people already deciding what to buy, and they keep sending visitors for years.

A steady pace spreads your traffic over months, and it stops you from burning a whole week on forms in one sitting.