How to launch your product: a checklist

Visitors from a launch decide quickly. Before you send anyone to your site, go through it like a stranger:

• Your own domain over HTTPS. A product on a platform subdomain is harder to remember and harder to build on later. Make sure http:// and www versions redirect to the one address you use.
• It works on a phone. Open the site on your own phone, on mobile data, and try the main path: land, understand, sign up or buy.
• Sign-up and checkout actually work. Create a fresh account in a private window. If you take payments, run a real one and refund it.
• A way to reach you. A contact email or form, and a privacy page if you collect any personal data.
• Nothing half-finished on show. Remove placeholder text, dead links and pages that say “coming soon” unless they really are coming soon.

Every launch board, directory and social post will ask for a short tagline. Write it once, carefully, and reuse it everywhere so people recognise your product as it travels.

• Say what it does and who it’s for. “Invoice tracking for freelance designers” tells a reader more than “The future of getting paid”.
• Use plain words. If a reader has to guess what a word means, they won’t click.
• Keep it short. Listings limit or truncate taglines (IndieTide allows 80 characters), so put the important words first.

Then write a two or three sentence description, and a longer one of a few paragraphs that covers the problem, how the product solves it and what it costs. Keep all three in one document you can paste from on launch day.

Most people look before they read. Prepare these before launch day:

• Three to five screenshots of the real product, with the most important screen first. Crop out browser chrome and empty space, and use the same size for all of them.
• A square logo as a PNG or SVG that still reads at small sizes.
• An optional short demo video that shows the product doing its main job. Many people watch without sound, so make it work muted.

Write a short description of each screenshot too. Many listings use it as alt text, which helps screen reader users and image search.

You only get launch-day numbers if analytics is running on launch day. Install it in advance, then visit your own site and confirm the visit shows up.

• Track the one action that matters most, such as a sign-up, a trial or a purchase, as an event or goal.
• Add UTM parameters to links you post yourself, for example ?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=launch, so you can tell your channels apart.
• Look at referrers as well. They show which listings and posts actually send people.

When someone shares your site, social networks and chat apps build a preview card from your page’s Open Graph tags. Without them you get a bare URL or a random image. Every important page should have:

• og:title and og:description, written for people rather than keywords.
• og:image, an absolute URL to the image. 1200 × 630 pixels is the size most commonly recommended for large preview cards.
• twitter:card set to summary_large_image if you want the large card on X.

Check the result with the social preview and meta tag checker. They read the HTML your server sends, which is what the networks see. Some networks cache previews, so fix them before you post.

Launch attention fades within days. Search traffic is what keeps coming afterwards, but only if your pages can be indexed. The common mistakes are left over from development:

• A noindex robots tag or header still on the production site.
• A robots.txt with Disallow: /.
• A canonical tag that points to a staging address or to a different page.
• No sitemap, or a sitemap that lists the wrong URLs.

Run your homepage through the indexability checker, then set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools before you launch, so the first visits from crawlers are recorded. The guide on getting indexed by Google and Bing walks through each step.

• Start with people who already know you. Your email list, past customers, friends and the communities you’re already part of. A launch rarely works if the first visitors have to come from strangers.
• Post on a handful of places, not fifty. Pick launch boards and communities where people like your users actually spend time. Read each one’s rules on self-promotion first.
• Don’t buy votes or organise vote rings. Most boards forbid it, and it tends to get listings removed. Asking people to take a look is fine.
• Be there. Reply to every comment and question, quickly and politely, including the critical ones. Thoughtful replies often do more for a launch than the listing itself.
• Keep a launch log. A simple spreadsheet with each place you posted, the URL of your listing and the date. You’ll need it next week.

• Check every listing. Go through your launch log and run each listing through the backlink checker. Did the link go live? Does it point to the right address? Is it followed or nofollow? Ask owners to fix mistakes, with the exact page and what’s wrong.
• Follow up on feedback. Fix the small things people pointed out, and tell them you did.
• Write about the launch. A short, honest post about what you built, what worked and the numbers you’re comfortable sharing gives people something to link to and share.
• Reach out to people who cover your niche. Newsletters, bloggers and podcasts are more likely to mention a product that has just launched and has something to show.
• Watch search, slowly. In Search Console, check that your pages are being indexed and look for your first impressions. Search results take weeks to settle, so don’t judge them by day one.

IndieTide is one weekly launch board among many. Each week runs Monday to Sunday, UTC, and takes up to 30 products, ranked by votes from signed-in people. Every launch keeps a permanent product page that links to your site.

That link is nofollow during your launch week and becomes a followed link once the week ends, as long as the listing stays up. There’s no badge to add in return: the IndieTide badge is optional and changes neither the link nor your ranking. The guide on judging launch directories explains why that matters.

Treat IndieTide as one listing in your launch week, not the whole plan. The people who already know you, and the communities your users belong to, usually matter more. For more places to launch, see the list of launch directories.