Product Launch

The arc, not the day

The launch is a 2-4 week arc with three phases; the #1000 plans Day 1, the #1 plans the arc and lets Day 1 be the peak of accumulated momentum.

• Pre-launch (7-14 days out): build the audience you launch TO, not the assets you launch WITH. A warmed waitlist converts 3-5x a cold audience on Day 1; a launch into an empty room is the default flop.
• Teaser (3-7 days out): one piece that creates curiosity without satisfying it. Goal: collect the email or follower, not explain the product. Over-explaining in the teaser burns the Day 1 reveal.
• Soft launch (24-48h before): ship to friends, family, a small slice of the waitlist, behind a private link. This is the bug catch: break it before the public does, and dry-run signup end to end.
• Launch day: a 2-4 hour concentrated push, not a 24h trickle. The warmest audience goes first to create visible momentum (signups, comments, social proof) that the broader audience lands into.
• Post-launch (7-14 days after): the second wave and the retention pivot. The #1000 launches and goes quiet; the #1 has the post-launch plan written before launch day.
• Date selection: avoid Monday (news cycle crowded) and Friday (dead weekend for B2B). Tuesday-Thursday for B2B. Avoid major news events, holidays, and known competitor launches; a launch competing with a bigger story is invisible.
• Thin vs thick launch: thin = one big day; thick = a week of content. Thick wins for products needing education (new category, complex value prop); thin works for a clear, self-explanatory improvement.
• Ship-readiness != feature-completeness. The product is never done; launch-readiness = core flow works, story is clear, assets are done. Ship the core, launch, iterate. Slipping the date for "one more feature" is the most common cause of a launch that never happens.

Positioning and the one sentence

• The one sentence: what it is, for whom, the single benefit. If you cannot say it in one sentence, you do not have a launch, you have a feature dump.
• Category creation vs category entry: creation (you define a new thing) needs more education, a longer arc, thought leadership; entry (you are better at an existing thing) needs differentiation, comparison, proof. Misjudging this over- or under-spends on education.
• The hero claim: one real, defensible, specific number or outcome that anchors. "Cuts deploy time from 40 min to 6 min" beats "10x faster". A fabricated round number (10x, 100x) reads as marketing and collapses under scrutiny.
• Narrative arc: problem (relatable, specific person) -> broken current solutions -> your approach -> proof -> the ask. The #1000 leads with the product; the #1 leads with the problem and the person who has it.
• Audience hierarchy: who must hear it first (the core 1000 superfans), then the reachable market, then the broader audience. Sequence messaging by audience, not by feature.
• The explain-it-to-a-10-year-old test: if a smart non-expert cannot restate what you do after one read, the positioning is not done, the copy is not clever.
• Bury the hero claim under a feature list and the launch dies: one claim, above the fold, in the headline. Features support it below.

Assets and the launch kit

The finite inventory. Missing any one of these creates a Day 1 fire.

• Landing page: the destination everything points to. One CTA above the fold; the #1000 has three competing. Hero claim in the headline, demo video or gif below, 3-5 supporting points, social proof, the CTA again.
• Demo video: 60-90s for the hero; under 30s for social cutdowns. Past 2 min you lose half the audience before the end. Show the product doing the thing, not talking heads.
• Screenshots: 5-8, hero shot plus the core flow. Used by press, social, and the app store; shoot at 2x for retina.
• Press kit: fact sheet (one page: what, who, why, when, the number), founder bios, company logos (light + dark), product screenshots. Without it, press uses whatever they find, which is wrong.
• Social assets: launch thread (Twitter/X), LinkedIn post plus carousel, IG/FB if the audience is there. One core message, platform-native rewrites, not copy-paste.
• Email sequence: waitlist (the reveal + the link), launch day (the public announcement), follow-up (Day 3-5 to non-openers). Email is the highest-ROI channel you fully own; underinvesting here is the common error.
• Changelog / release notes: the honest, specific list of what shipped. Developers and power users read this; its absence signals vapor.
• Support / FAQ doc: the top 10 questions with answers, published before launch. Without it, support drowns on Day 1 answering the same 5 questions.
• Internal enablement: a one-pager for sales, support, and success with the top 5 questions and objection handlers, delivered before launch not after. They are the ones talking to real users first.
• Asset production order: landing page first (the destination), then video (longest lead, 1-2 weeks), then screenshots, then social, then email last (fastest to produce, can be day-of).
• The forgotten asset, every time: the support doc and the internal one-pager. No external glamor, first cut when time is short, and exactly what saves Day 1.

Channels and amplification

• Owned (email, social, blog) > earned (press, influencer, community) > paid (amplify the winners). You control owned; earned gives credibility and reach; paid multiplies what already works.
• Earned-media mechanics: embargo (brief press 3-7 days ahead under embargo, lift at launch time) gives breadth; exclusive (one outlet gets it first) gives one big spike. Exclusive if you have one newsworthy angle; embargo if the story is broad.
• Influencer / community: identify 10-30 people who already reach your audience, brief them a week ahead with assets, let them publish at launch. The #1000 cold-DMs 100 at launch; the #1 warmed 20 a month before.
• Paid only amplifies what is already organically working. Run paid after Day 1, once you know the message and creative that converts. Launching Day 1 paid on an untested message burns budget on the wrong story.
• Channel-asset fit: video for feeds; long-form for blog and SEO; thread for Twitter/X; carousel for LinkedIn; demo gif for Product Hunt and communities. Cross-posting the same asset underperforms native rewrites.
• Product Hunt: launch at 00:01 PT for the full 24h cycle; line up hunters and commenters in advance; the first-hour momentum shapes the day.
• Hacker News: post Tuesday-Thursday morning US time; a genuine "Show HN" with a real founder comment beats a marketing post, which gets flagged.
• Reddit: read each subreddit's self-promotion rules before posting; many ban direct promo and require a ~10:1 contribution ratio. A rule violation deletes the post and the karma.

Launch day execution

• The runbook: a doc with time-stamped actions, owners, and asset links. Everyone in one channel (Slack/Zoom war room); no one improvises the sequence.
• Time zone by audience, not by you. US B2B: 6-9am ET catches the morning scroll. Global/dev: 00:01 PT for the Product Hunt cycle. Launching at your local 9am when your buyers are asleep wastes the first 8 hours.
• The first 2 hours set the day: the warmest audience (waitlist, superfans, the soft-launch group) goes first, in a concentrated push, to create visible momentum the broader audience lands into.
• Monitoring dashboard: signups, activation rate, error rate, server load, support tickets, social mentions. Check every 15-30 min for the first 2 hours, hourly after.
• What breaks, in order: the signup flow (dry-run it end to end the day before), the landing page (refresh cache, load-test the form), the servers (load-test to 3-5x expected peak), support (staff 2-3x normal for 48h).
• On-call for 48h including the weekend. Someone is always watching at 3am; if it is not you, it is a user hitting a broken signup with no one to tell.
• The war room is for decisions, not status: the only question is "ship the fix, hold the message, or pull the paid spend?" Repeated every 30 min until stable.

Metrics and the bar

• Real metrics, in order: activated signups (not raw visits), Day 1 activation rate, Day 7 retention, Day 30 retention, conversion to paid. Each later metric is the truth-test of the earlier one.
• Activation is the one you must define before launch: the specific action that correlates with retention (created first project, invited a teammate, ran first query). The #1000 counts signups; the #1 counts activations.
• Honest ranges, not fabricated precision: warmed waitlist Day 1 conversion 15-40%; cold traffic 1-5%; SaaS trial-to-paid 10-25%; good consumer D7 retention 25-40%, SaaS D7 40-60%. Orientation, not target.
• Vanity blacklist: total visits, social impressions, press mentions, email opens. Each without its downstream metric (conversions, clicks, traffic, clicks) is a number that feels like winning and is not.
• The launch spike then cliff is the default failure: a big Day 1 with Day 7 under 20% of Day 1. The launch succeeds only if Day 30 retention holds; a spike without retention is borrowed attention.
• Set the success bar before launch: write down the number for success and the number for pull-the-plug / pivot. Without a pre-committed bar, post-launch rationalization redefines any result as a win.

Post-launch momentum

• The launch is the start, not the end. A 2-week post-launch plan written before launch day is what separates a launch from a press release.
• Second wave: follow-up email to non-openers Day 3-5; a "what we shipped since launch" update Day 7-10; a case study or social proof post Day 14. Each extends the tail.
• Fix what broke, fast: triage bugs by Day 2, ship fixes Day 3-5, communicate them. A launch with bugs you fix publicly beats a launch with no bugs you never mention.
• Retention pivot by Day 7: shift energy from acquisition (getting people in) to retention (making them stay). Onboarding flow, lifecycle emails, the first-aha optimization. Acquisition without retention is filling a leaky bucket.
• The post-mortem within 1 week: what worked, what did not, what changes for next launch. Documented; the next launch is always sooner than expected.
• The ~7-touch rule: a prospect needs roughly 7 exposures to act. One launch tweet is 1 touch; the post-launch cadence supplies the other 6. A single announcement that goes silent reaches almost no one.

Situations

Where camps disagree

• Big bang vs rolling invite-only: big bang for maximum Day 1 momentum and press, where the product is proven and the category rewards signal (consumer, viral). Rolling (invite-only beta -> wider) for high-risk, high-switching-cost, or enterprise products where a public flop is unrecoverable and validation must precede scale.
• Embargo vs exclusive vs open: exclusive for one newsworthy angle (one big spike, one outlet owns it); embargo for a broad story (many outlets, breadth); open (just publish) when press is not the channel and owned + community carry it. The choice is news value and press relevance, not preference.
• Paid on Day 1 vs paid after: paid on Day 1 only with a proven message and known unit economics; after Day 1 for everyone else, so paid amplifies the creative that already converts organically. Day 1 paid on an untested message burns budget on the wrong story.
• Founder-led narrative vs brand narrative: founder-led wins early-stage, category-creating, personality-driven launches (the founder is the proof). Brand narrative wins at scale and in B2B where the buyer does not reference the founder; the founder-led version reads as ego and underperforms.
• Thick launch vs thin: thick for education-heavy or new-category products that need repetition to land; thin for a clear, self-explanatory improvement where one day suffices. Misjudging education need under- or over-spends.

Related Skills

Install with clawhub install <slug> if the user confirms:

• go-to-market - the broader GTM strategy this launch is one beat of
• copywriting - the landing page, email, and social copy the launch runs on
• email-marketing - the waitlist, launch day, and follow-up sequence mechanics
• landing-page - the destination asset, its structure, and the one-CTA discipline
• retention - the D7/D30 bar that decides whether the launch held