Launch day: get your first 100 users
Nobody stumbles across a new SaaS. A good launch is a planned week: a warmed-up waitlist, 20 friendly first users, a post on every channel your buyers read, and a schedule for the day itself. This is the whole playbook, with copy you can adapt and the lines you never cross.
- A plan for bugs, harsh feedback and a sudden traffic spike, so launch day doesn't become outage day
- The follow-up email and activation routine that turns signups into people who actually use the product
- A working product people can sign up for and use today. If you're not there yet, finish Build your MVP fast and Ship it like a pro first
- Your waitlist and interview notes from Validate before you build, even if the list is small
- Payments switched on (see Take payments with Stripe), or a clear decision to launch free first
- Accounts on the channels you'll use, ideally a few weeks old with some genuine activity (new accounts get filtered hard on Reddit and Hacker News)
- A free calendar and a notes doc. That's the whole toolkit
Treat it as a launch week, not a launch day
A single big day is fragile. A week of planned pushes gives you several shots at attention and time to fix what breaks.
Here's the myth: you post on Product Hunt, the internet notices, and you wake up to a thousand users. Here's what usually happens: you post, a handful of friends click, the post sinks, and you decide launching doesn't work. The difference between those two stories is almost never the product. It's the prep.
So stop thinking of launch as one day. Think of it as a week with a shape:
- Days -7 to -1 (warm-up): email the waitlist, post build-in-public updates, line up 20 friendly first users, prepare every asset.
- Day 0 (launch day): Product Hunt plus one or two other channels, with you online all day answering every comment.
- Days +1 to +3 (second wave): Show HN, Reddit and communities on different days, so each one gets your full attention.
- Days +4 to +7 (follow-up): the follow-up email, activation calls, fixes shipped in public, a launch recap post.
Set a goal you can actually count"100 users" means 100 people who signed up and did the one thing that shows they got value (created their first project, sent their first invoice, connected their first account). Signups that never come back are vanity. Write down three numbers now: signups, activated users and paying users. You'll track all three every day this week.
TipDon't launch on a day you can't be online for 12 hours. Block the calendar, tell your family, cancel the dentist. Founders who answer every comment within minutes get noticeably more out of the same post than founders who check in at lunch.