The SaaS pre-launch checklist: the page, the places, the tracking

A stranger who lands on your page has to understand it without you there. Four questions cover it, and every one is a set of written tests you can check yourself:

• Clarity: can they say what it is, and what changes for them, from the first screen alone?
• Audience: is it plainly for them, in their own words, with the problem before the product?
• Offer: can they find the price, pick a plan, see why to act now, and see what it costs to try?
• Proof: is there evidence a stranger would accept, specific and honest for your stage?

Each question breaks into four or five tests. The full list, with real pages that passed and failed each one, is in the rubric.

Pick one to three places and do them properly, rather than twenty in a rush. A Product Hunt launch is one day; a product only launches again with a significant new version, so spend it when the page is ready, not the day the code is.

Many directories that say "free" want a link back from your site, a queue of weeks or months, or payment for the followed link. Read each one's free route before you submit, and keep the ones that fit your product and your timeline.

Start with the free directories, checked by hand, Product Hunt and its alternatives side by side, and whether Product Hunt is worth it for a solo founder.

Test the whole path once, from the launch link to the welcome email, and check that the sign-up is recorded. A launch with broken tracking looks exactly like a launch nobody liked, and you will spend the next week fixing a page that was never the problem.

Do it as a stranger would, not as yourself:

1. Open the launch link in a private window, on a phone as well as a laptop. Use the exact link you will post, with its tracking parameters, not your homepage.
2. Sign up with an address you have never used on the product. Your own account is already logged in, already verified and already past the onboarding a stranger hits.
3. Check that the welcome email arrives, and that it does not land in spam. If you send from a new domain, this is where it fails most quietly.
4. Check that the sign-up appears where you will look on launch day: your database, your analytics, the dashboard you plan to watch. If it shows up in one and not the other, decide now which one you trust.
5. Check that your analytics counts the visit at all. A consent banner, an ad blocker or a script that loads after the click can make a real visitor invisible. Know how big that gap is before you read any numbers.

Then delete the test account, so it does not count as your first user.

Grill the page once, change the one or two things it says to fix first, and check it again a day later, before the traffic arrives. Change one or two things, not everything: if you rewrite the whole page the night before, you cannot tell what helped, and you launch a page nobody has read.

Things to read again on the day before, in this order:

• The first screen, on a phone. It is what most launch visitors see, and it is where a stranger decides whether to scroll.
• The price, and whether a visitor can find it within one scroll or one click. "Cannot find it" reads the same as "too expensive".
• The reason to act today. A launch price with an end date, a real limit, or what waiting costs. If none of those is true, make one true or leave it out; invented urgency fails its own test.
• The proof, and whether it is honest for your stage. A new product claiming thousands of users loses more trust than one that shows twelve real ones.
• The launch post itself, against the page. The post makes a promise; the page has to keep it in the first screen.

Give it a day before you judge it. Then, if visitors came and nobody signed up, the zero-sign-ups guide walks the four checks in order: whether the sign-up is broken or not counted, whether anyone came, whether the page lost them, and whether the offer did. The first two take ten minutes and they come first, because they make every later change look like it failed.

If people did sign up, write down where they came from while you still remember which post went where. A second launch, on a different site or months later, starts from that list.

• The page passes a stranger's reading: the 18 tests, or a grill
• One to three launch places picked, each one's free route read
• The launch link tested in a private window, on a phone and a laptop
• A test sign-up recorded, the welcome email received, the test account deleted
• The page read again the day before, one or two things changed
• The launch post checked against the page's first screen
• A plan for the day after: where sign-ups came from, and what to check if there were none