Launch Plan — work back from the date, decide plan B now

Launches fail in predictable ways: assets finish late, every channel fires the same generic announcement, and mid-launch panic produces day-3 decisions that should have been made in week minus-3. This plan works backwards from the date, gives every channel its native role, and writes the plan-B triggers while nobody is panicking.

Inputs

• What is launching, the hard date, and the one number the launch must hit: $ARGUMENTS
• From marketing-brief.md if present: top pains and desires (the big idea comes from them), the offer, the primary channel, the message pillars, and the language bank for copy.

Do this

1. Fix the goal and the date. One number the launch must hit — revenue, signups, booked calls — and the date it must hit it by. Everything else flexes; these two do not.
2. Choose the big idea: the one angle or story the whole campaign hangs on, drawn from the sharpest pain or desire in the brief. Test it in one sentence — would the ICP stop for it? A launch with three big ideas has none.
3. Write the asset list — landing page, email sequence, posts, ads, creative, sales enablement — each tagged with the funnel stage it serves and the pillar it ladders to. Inside Claude Code, the launch-planner agent runs the deep version of this pass, and asset builds route to the creative skills (/marketing:hook-factory for the openers, for instance).
4. Build the T-minus timeline backwards from launch day: assets locked, warm-up and seeding phase (the audience should feel it coming), open day, mid-launch proof drop, close sequence. Every item gets a deadline and an owner, even if every owner is the same person.
5. Choreograph the channels — what fires where, when, in what order, each in its native role rather than reposting the same announcement:
   • Long-form and email carry the argument and do the closing.
   • Social builds surround-sound presence and pulls people into the argument.
   • The primary channel carries the weight; everything else exists to feed it.
6. Pre-agree the mid-launch decisions: the day-2 or day-3 numbers that trigger plan B — swap the angle, drop more proof early, extend the close, or hold steady. Written now, not improvised on day 3.
7. Name the two most likely failure points and the pre-built response to each.

Output

The one-page launch plan — goal and date, big idea, asset list with deadlines and owners, T-minus timeline, channel choreography grid, decision triggers, and the risk pass. After the launch, run /marketing:campaign-debrief to bank what it taught.

Rules

• The date is fixed; scope flexes. Cut assets before cutting the deadline — a smaller launch on time beats a fuller one late.
• One big idea. Every asset is a variation on it, or it gets cut.
• Plan the close hardest. Most launch revenue arrives at the end, and the close sequence is the worst place to improvise.
• Never launch cold. The warm-up phase is part of the launch, not overhead to trim.
• Real urgency only. If there is no genuine reason to act now, build one into the offer before launching, or launch without a countdown.