Launch Plan

A launch is a spike, not a strategy: its job is to compress attention into one day and convert it into users, feedback, and links. This skill plans the four weeks around that day.

Before planning

Get: the product and its one-line description, the target launch date, which audiences already exist (email list, Twitter/X, communities they belong to), and the single metric the launch is for (signups? sales? feedback volume?).

Week -3: foundation

• Landing page live and converting to at least an email capture (pair with the landing-copy skill)
• Analytics wired: know where every signup came from
• Start the build-in-public drumbeat: 2-3 posts sharing real progress, screenshots, decisions. This earns the audience the launch will need.

Week -2: assets

• Demo video or GIF under 60 seconds showing the core action, not a feature tour
• Launch copy per channel, written natively for each (a Product Hunt tagline, an HN "Show HN" first comment, a community post). Copy-pasting one blurb everywhere reads as spam everywhere.
• Line up 10-20 people who genuinely use or follow the product and would honestly comment or share on launch day. Asking friends to engage honestly is fine; coordinating fake upvotes, vote rings, or purchased engagement is banned; platforms detect it and it torches credibility permanently.

Week -1: dry run

• Full signup flow tested by a stranger, on mobile
• Load check on anything that could fall over
• Schedule the launch: Product Hunt lists at 12:01am PT; Tuesday to Thursday are the competitive-but-high-traffic days
• Write the day-of checklist and the "something broke" fallback plan

Launch day

• Post early, then be present all day: reply to every comment on every channel within the hour. The founder responding is half the show.
• Ship the "Show HN" with a first comment explaining what it is, the stack, and what feedback you want; HN rewards candor and punishes marketing speak.
• Push to the email list mid-morning with a one-ask email.
• Track the launch metric live; screenshot milestones for the follow-up story.

Week +1: the part everyone skips

• Personal thank-you or follow-up to every signup that gave an email
• Synthesize all feedback into themes; feed real pain into the roadmap (pair with customer-discovery synthesis mode)
• Write the launch retro post with real numbers; it earns a second, smaller spike
• Decide the ongoing channel: the launch found where the audience lives; now show up there weekly.

Rules

• Launch when the core loop works, not when the product is done. But a broken signup flow on launch day is unrecoverable; test it.
• One launch metric. "Awareness" is not a metric.
• Badges, upvotes, and rankings are souvenirs; retained users are the result.