The launch checklist

Launch day is when you're most excited and most tempted to skip steps. So we don't decide anything on launch day. We run a list written by a calmer version of ourselves, in order.

Before you touch the button

1. Buy something from yourself. Real card, real email, cheapest plan. The checkout flow is the one page a broken deploy hurts most and the one page you never test signed out. If Stripe is in test mode, today is the day you find out.
2. Read the site on your phone, over cellular. Not the simulator — your actual phone, Wi‑Fi off. Launch traffic is mostly phones, and phone traffic finds the layout bug your desktop never will.
3. Check the empty states. Every new user sees zero projects, zero data, zero history. If the empty screen doesn't say what to do next, your first visitors bounce silently.
4. Point analytics at one number. Pick the single event that means it worked — a signup, a sale — and make sure it fires in PostHog or whatever you run. Ten dashboards is the same as none when traffic is actually arriving.

After the button

Post once, everywhere, then close the tabs. Refreshing an upvote count burns the exact energy you'll need to answer the first support email — which is the real launch moment: a stranger cared enough to write.

Nothing on this list takes twenty minutes. All of it has saved a launch.