Launch Week for Founders: A Checklist Before You Post Your Product
Launch boards are one of the few places where people actively go looking for new products. A good listing can bring your first users, your first feedback and a handful of links in a single week. A rushed one sends that attention to a site that is not ready for it.
This checklist covers the week before and the week of a launch. It is written for founders posting on weekly boards such as ShipDesk, a free launch platform for founders, which runs a fresh board every Monday for web, iOS, Android and Mac apps and gives each launch its own page.
Key facts
- 1 week — Most launch boards reset weekly, so the timing of your post matters
- First screen — Visitors decide in seconds whether your product is for them
- One goal — Pick a single action you want launch visitors to take
- UTMs — Tag every launch link so you can see which board sent whom
Seven days out: make the site ready for strangers
- Headline test. Can someone who has never heard of you say what the product does after reading the first screen? If not, rewrite the headline before anything else.
- One call to action. Sign up, start a trial or join a waitlist. Not all three.
- Speed on mobile. Run PageSpeed Insights on a phone profile and fix anything that pushes Largest Contentful Paint past about 2.5 seconds.
- Social preview. Set an Open Graph image and description so the link looks right when people share it.
- Analytics and Search Console connected, so the launch shows up in data you trust.
- A feedback route that a real person reads during launch week.
How weekly launch boards work
Most boards follow the same pattern: you paste your website or app store link, the product gets a listing page, and visitors browse that week’s launches by category and upvote favourites. ShipDesk’s site describes launches as free, with a board that resets every Monday and a launch page that links back to your site. Because the board resets, the first days of the week carry the most attention, so publishing early in the week usually helps.
A launch page is also a lasting link to your site. Treat the listing as a small landing page in its own right, not a form to rush through.
Writing the listing
- Name and a one-line tagline that states the outcome, not the technology.
- Three benefits, each something a user actually gets.
- Who it is for, in one sentence. Being specific attracts the right first users.
- Screenshots or a short clip of the product doing its main job.
- Pricing in plain words, including whether there is a free tier.
- A link with UTM parameters, for example
?utm_source=shipdesk&utm_medium=launch, so visits are attributed correctly.
Launch day and the week after
Reply to every comment the same day. Early comments are where your best product feedback comes from, and responsive founders tend to collect more attention. Share the listing with your own audience once, with a short personal note, rather than asking for votes.
After the week, look at three numbers: visits from the board, sign-ups or trials from those visits, and how many of those users came back a second time. The third number tells you whether the launch found real users or just curious visitors.
Launch on more than one board, not on the same day
Spreading launches across a few weeks gives you several smaller waves of attention and lets you fix what the first wave revealed. Keep a simple sheet of where you launched, the date, the link and the results, so you can repeat what worked.
Disclosure: BuiltToWinWeb and ShipDesk exchanged links through VerifiedDR. The link to ShipDesk in this article is marked as sponsored. We describe only what the product’s own site says it does; this is not a paid review.
Related reading
Frequently asked questions
When is the best day to launch on a weekly board?
On boards that reset weekly, early in the week usually gives a listing the most time in front of visitors. Check each board’s own reset day before you choose.
Does a launch board listing help SEO?
A listing page that links to your site is a real link and can help a new domain get discovered and crawled. The bigger value is usually early users and feedback.
What should I fix before launching?
A clear first-screen headline, one call to action, fast mobile loading, a social preview image, analytics, and a feedback route someone actually reads.
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