Launch week playbook
A good launch week is mostly prep you did before it. Here's the plan I'd follow, day by day, with a checklist to tick through.
A launch week is mostly prep you did the two weeks before. The week itself is five days of showing up in a few places and answering everyone who talks to you. This launch week playbook is the plan I'd follow for a small SaaS with a small audience, which is most of us.
One thing up front: a launch is a spike, not a strategy. Plan for what happens the week after, because that's when the people who signed up decide whether to stay.
Two weeks before launch week
- →Make the signup and payment flow boring. Test it with a real card. A broken checkout on launch day costs more than any missing feature.
- →Write the launch post now, then rewrite it twice. It should say who it's for, what it does and what it costs.
- →Make a list of every person who has ever said they'd try it. Replies, DMs, waitlist. Those people go first.
- →Record a 30 to 60 second screen recording of the main flow. No music, no intro. Just the product doing the thing.
- →Spend these two weeks replying to people with the problem. Every conversation now is someone who might show up on launch day.
Monday: tell the people who already care
Message everyone on your list personally. Not a blast, a short note: "It's live, here's a link, I'd love to hear what breaks." Then post the launch on X with the video. Pin it. Spend the rest of the day replying to every comment within an hour.
Tuesday: the bigger launch site
If you're doing a launch site, Tuesday or Wednesday tends to be a reasonable day. Go in with realistic hopes. For a niche B2B tool it's often more about a backlink and some early feedback than a flood of customers. I wrote up the trade offs in KittyLeads vs Product Hunt. Whatever you pick, stay at your desk and answer every comment.
Wednesday: go to where the problem is
The launch post reaches your followers. The people with the problem mostly don't follow you yet. Search X for posts about the problem from the last few days and reply to them helpfully. You can now say "I just launched something for this" without it feeling like a stretch, as long as the reply helps first.
anyone tried Statuskit? saw it launch yesterday, wondering if it handles cron monitoring or just uptime
I built it, so I'm biased, but happy to answer. It does both: HTTP checks and cron heartbeats, with alerts if a job doesn't check in on time. Cron is on every plan. If something you need is missing, tell me and I'll be honest about whether it's coming.
Thursday: fix what broke and say so
By now you have a list of bugs and confused users. Fix the top three and post about it: "Launched Monday, 3 fixes shipped from your feedback." It shows the product is alive and gives you a reason to post again without repeating the pitch.
Friday: talk to signups
Email or DM every person who signed up and didn't do the main thing. Ask what stopped them. Don't sell. Most will ignore you. The few who answer tell you what to fix next week. Then write a short recap post with honest numbers, even if they're small. Small honest numbers get more goodwill than vague hype.
That's the week. To keep track, tick through the checklist below as you go. It covers the prep, each day, and the follow up.
The week after
Most launch signups don't convert in week one. Keep doing the Wednesday work every day: find people with the problem and help them. That steady stream is what solo SaaS founders live on long after the launch is forgotten. If you're unsure how much time to put into posting versus replying from here, I worked through it in build in public, sell in replies.
KittyLeads is built for that daily part. It finds people on X posting about your problem and drafts a reply for each, and you send the ones you like. It's useful during launch week and more useful the week after.
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