Most launch checklists are written by people selling launch services. They are long, they are vague, and they treat every item as equally important.
This one is ordered by what actually breaks. Everything in the first section has sunk real launches. Everything in the last section is optional and you should feel fine skipping it.
Work backwards from your launch date.
Two Weeks Before: The Things That Break Launches
Your site survives a traffic spike
The most preventable launch failure. A front-page Hacker News post or a strong Product Hunt day can send several thousand visitors in an hour.
Check specifically: does your landing page render without a database call? Are you on a free tier with a request cap? What happens at 100 concurrent signups? If you cannot answer these, load-test with a simple tool before launch day rather than discovering the answer live.
Signup works from a cold browser
Open an incognito window, on your phone, on a network that is not your home wifi, and sign up as a stranger would.
The classic failure is a signup flow that works perfectly for you because you are already authenticated, and fails for everyone else. Test the email verification too — that is where most broken flows actually break.
Your one-sentence description exists
Write the sentence that explains what your product does, with no adjectives and no "revolutionary."
You will paste this into every directory, every social post, and every comment reply. Writing it once, well, is worth more than any other hour of launch preparation. If you cannot write it, that is a positioning problem and it will not get better on launch day.
Analytics are actually recording
Confirm events are arriving, not just that the script is installed. Launch traffic you cannot measure teaches you nothing, and this is a five-minute check.
One Week Before: Assets and Positioning
Screenshots that show the product working
Not your login page. Not an empty dashboard. The product doing the thing it exists to do, with realistic data in it.
Empty states are the most common screenshot mistake — they make a product look unfinished even when it is not.
A demo video, if the product needs explaining
Thirty to sixty seconds, no intro, no music, no talking head. Screen recording of the core flow. If your product is visually obvious, skip this entirely.
Pick your primary platform — just one
Choose one launch that gets your full attention. Product Hunt if you have an audience to mobilise, Hacker News if the product is technical, Peerlist or Fazier if you are starting cold.
Splitting attention across two big platforms on the same day reliably produces two mediocre launches.
Check your eligibility windows
BetaList only accepts products that have not publicly launched. If you want it, submit before you launch anywhere else, because you cannot go back.
Write your launch copy in advance
Draft the post, the first comment, and the social posts now — not at 6am on launch day when you are anxious and making typos.
Launch Day
Post early
For daily-leaderboard platforms, early submissions get the most hours of visibility. Product Hunt days start at 12:01am PT. You do not need to be awake at midnight, but launching at 3pm PT gives up most of your window.
Write the first comment yourself
Explain why you built it, what it does not do yet, and what feedback you want. This is consistently the highest-value thing you write, and it is where people decide whether you seem worth supporting.
Be specific about limitations. It builds more trust than a polished pitch.
Reply to every single comment
All day. Including the critical ones, especially the critical ones. A thoughtful reply to a harsh comment converts more people than the original post did.
Tell people directly — do not ask for upvotes
Message people who would genuinely find it useful and send them the link. Do not ask for votes; most platforms prohibit it, and it is detectable.
"I built this thing you might find useful" works. "Please upvote" gets your launch removed.
Watch your error logs
Launch day is when real users find the bugs your testing missed. Have your logs open. Fixing a signup bug in the first hour can save the entire launch.
The Week After
Launch day is not the end, and this is the section most checklists omit entirely.
Message everyone who signed up
Personally. Ask what they hoped it would do. The replies are worth more than your analytics at this stage, and this is only possible while the numbers are small.
Submit to permanent listings
Directories that are not time-sensitive — the ones that keep working months later. This is the right work for the week after, while launch traffic settles.
Write down what happened
Traffic, signups, where they came from, what people said. Your second launch will be substantially better than your first only if you recorded the first honestly.
Fix the top complaint
Whatever three or more people mentioned, fix it this week while you still have their attention.
Things You Can Skip
Written to save you time, because launch checklists tend to pad:
A press kit. Nobody requests it for a launch this size.
Reaching out to journalists. Not for a first launch with no traction. They will not cover it, and the time is better spent elsewhere.
Paid ads on launch day. You do not yet know your messaging or conversion rate. You will spend money learning things a conversation would have told you free.
Launching on eight platforms at once. Discussed above. Pick one, then spread the rest across the following weeks.
A perfect landing page. Good enough and shipped beats perfect and delayed. You will rewrite it after launch anyway, using words your actual users gave you.
Realistic Expectations
Worth setting these, because disappointment on launch day is mostly a calibration failure.
A first launch with no audience typically produces tens of visitors, not thousands. A good outcome is 20 to 100 signups and five conversations that teach you something. A great outcome is one person who becomes a genuine ongoing user.
Products that succeed rarely win one enormous launch. They accumulate small amounts of visibility repeatedly until the total matters. Your first launch is the first of several, and it is mostly practice.
The Compressed Version
Site survives traffic. Signup works from a cold browser.
One-sentence description written and reused everywhere.
Screenshots showing the product working, with real data.
One primary platform, chosen deliberately.
Launch early in the day. First comment written by you.
Reply to everything. Watch your logs.
Message every signup personally.
Permanent listings the following week.
Write down what happened.
That is the whole thing. Everything else is optional.
When you are ready, listing on BuiltByIndies is free and permanent — and our guide to Product Hunt alternatives covers where else to submit.
