Where to launch your app: a four week plan
Launching is not one day on one site. Here is the schedule that gets the most out of a product nobody has heard of yet.
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- SpacerrApps
- Published
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- 4 min read
Most launches fail on preparation rather than on placement. The product goes up on a Tuesday, the founder posts it in six places that afternoon, three of them reject it for a missing screenshot, and the whole thing is over by Thursday with 40 visits.
This is the version that works, spread across four weeks, with roughly two hours of work in each.
Week minus two: build the kit once
Every platform asks for the same seven things. Write them once, keep them in one folder, and stop rewriting them at midnight.
- Name. Just the name. No tagline glued on with a dash.
- One line, under 60 characters. What it does, for whom. Not a slogan.
- A paragraph, 150 to 300 characters. The line plus the reason to care.
- Icon, 512 by 512. Square, no rounded corners of your own, no drop shadow.
- Three to five screenshots at one consistent size, showing the product doing something rather than its empty state.
- Price, as a number. "Contact us" costs you listings.
- A category, picked from the list every directory uses rather than invented.
The full field list, with sizes and character limits, is in the directory submission checklist.
Then check the two things that reject a submission fastest: your site loads without a login, and it explains what the product is above the fold.
Week minus two: go early where early is the point
Submit to BetaList now. It exists for unfinished products and the audience is there to be first, so a mature product is a mismatch and a nearly-ready one is exactly right.
Do the same in whichever community already argues about your problem. Not to promote anything. Post the thing you learned building it, and mention the product once at the end.
Week zero: launch day
Pick a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Avoid the week of a large public holiday and the week of a conference in your category.
| Hour | What |
|---|---|
| 00:01 Pacific | Product Hunt, with the first comment ready |
| Morning | Uneed, and DevHunt if it is a dev tool |
| Midday | Show HN, plainly, no marketing voice |
| All day | Answer every comment within the hour |
Two rules that decide the whole day. Do not ask for upvotes anywhere public, which gets the launch discounted. And write the first comment before you post: an empty page is one nobody stays on.
Tell the people who already know you. Not a mass email. Twenty individual messages to people who have asked about the product beats a newsletter to two thousand who have not.
Week zero plus one: the second wave
The spike is over by now and this is the week most founders stop, which is why it is the week worth doing.
This is also the week for the rest of the list: the ten directories worth submitting to, and the Product Hunt alternatives if the big day underdelivered.
Post the launch retrospective on Indie Hackers with the real numbers in it, including the disappointing ones. Submit to AlternativeTo and SaaSHub, which give you nothing today and keep giving you something for years. Send five emails to podcasts in your niche.
Then get a page written about the product. A leaderboard entry disappears when the day ends; an article about what your app does is the only listing that can rank for anything except your product's name. That is what this site is for: submit your app, a person reviews it, and it gets a directory page and a full write-up, both free, both permanent.
Week zero plus two: turn the traffic into something
You now know two things you did not know a fortnight ago: which channel sent people who stayed, and what those people asked you.
- Take the three questions everybody asked and answer them on your own site
- Add the two features people assumed you had, or say plainly that you will not
- Ask the ten most engaged users for a review on whichever directory takes them
- Write down which channel converted, because that is the one to repeat next release
What not to do
Do not submit to four hundred directories in one night. Automated submission tools sell exactly this, and the pattern is obvious to both the directories and to Google. Ten real listings beat four hundred thin ones.
Do not launch on Friday. Nobody reads anything on Saturday.
Do not relaunch the same page on the same site because the first attempt went quiet. Change the product or change the room.
Do not treat launch day as the goal. It is the noisiest and shortest part of getting found. The pages you set up in the fortnight after it are the ones still working next year.
The one page that outlasts the week
If you do one thing from this plan, make it the last one. A permanent page with real prose about your app, on a domain that is not yours, with a followed link back.
Submit yours, or see what a listing includes first.