The launch checklist: what to have ready before you post anywhere

Launch day goes wrong in boring ways. The screenshot is the wrong aspect ratio. The demo video is 90 seconds of you saying "so basically". Someone clicks through from a directory, lands on a page that asks for a credit card before showing anything, and leaves.

None of that is a launch problem. It is a preparation problem that only becomes visible when traffic arrives. This is the list we run through before a listing goes live, roughly in the order the work makes sense.

Two weeks out: fix what a crawler sees

Every directory that auto-fills a submission form is reading your page the same way. Ours does, and so does everyone else's. Whatever is in your HTML becomes your listing unless you overwrite it by hand — so it is worth getting right once rather than editing it in eight different forms.

The five things that get read:

You can check what a crawler makes of your page without submitting anything. Our readiness audit runs the same six checks we apply to every submission and hands back a specific fix for each one it fails. It is not a rating; it is a list of things to change.

The one check that is not cosmetic is the duplicate check. If your domain is already listed somewhere, submitting again creates a second entry that splits your upvotes and confuses anyone who finds both. Claim or update the existing listing instead.

One week out: the assets

Screenshots. Most directories want 16:9, and most people submit whatever their screen happened to be. A 2400px-tall full-page capture gets letterboxed into an unreadable strip. Take the screenshots at 1920×1080 with the product in a real state — a populated dashboard, not an empty one with a "Get started" modal over it.

If your product has an empty state that a new user actually sees first, do not screenshot it. Screenshot what it looks like once it is working. You are showing the destination.

Logo. Square, at least 512×512, on a transparent or solid background. Not your wordmark. A wordmark rendered at 40px in a card is a grey smudge.

The tagline. Sixty characters, describing what the thing does. This is the hardest sixty characters you will write and it is worth an hour. There is a whole post about this, but the short version: name the job, not the category. "AI-powered productivity platform" tells a reader nothing they can act on.

A demo video, if you have one. Optional everywhere, and a bad one is worse than none. Under 60 seconds, no intro card, starts with the product already on screen.

Three days out: the landing page

Traffic from a directory is colder than traffic from your own channels. Someone clicked a card with a one-line description, and they will decide in about eight seconds whether to keep reading. So:

• The headline should say what it does, not what it enables. Save the vision for people who already care.
• Show the product above the fold. A screenshot, an embedded demo, something.
• If there is a free tier or a trial, say so in the first screen. "Request a demo" as the only path is fine for enterprise sales and fatal for directory traffic.
• Make sure the page works on a phone. A meaningful share of launch-day clicks come from someone scrolling on their phone.

Then check the boring infrastructure: does the page load in under two seconds cold, does signup actually work in a fresh incognito window, does your email verification arrive. Signup being broken on launch day is common enough that it is worth testing from scratch rather than trusting that it worked last Tuesday.

The day before: decide where you are posting

Do not submit to everything at once. Directories differ enormously in whether they send anyone, and a scattergun submission run costs you a day and produces a spreadsheet of pending reviews. We keep a running list of directories with a note on what each one is actually for.

Order matters less than people think, with one exception: if you are doing a ranked launch anywhere — a weekly board, a daily leaderboard — pick the day deliberately, and do not submit to that surface first thing in a run when you are tired and rushing the copy.

Have ready, in a text file, before you start:

• Product name, exactly as you want it displayed
• Tagline, 60 characters
• Description, 600 characters
• Your three categories, decided in advance
• Pricing model
• URL, with UTM parameters if you plan to attribute the traffic
• Your X handle
• The first comment, if the surface has one — 200 words on why you built it

Having this in one place turns eight submission forms from an afternoon into forty minutes.

Launch day

Post early in your target audience's morning, not yours. Reply to every comment within the hour — on ranked boards, engagement in the first few hours is what determines whether anyone sees you at all.

Do not ask people to upvote you. Every ranked platform detects vote rings, and the ones that do not are not worth ranking on. Tell people you launched and link them to it; what they do next is up to them.

Watch your analytics for the referrer, not just the number. Two hundred visits from one directory and forty from another tells you where to spend effort next time, which is the actual return on a launch — not the day itself, but knowing what to repeat.

The week after

Directories are permanent in a way that a launch day is not. A listing keeps ranking for its keyword long after the launch traffic stops. So:

• Fill in anything you left blank. Half-complete listings rank worse and convert worse.
• Add the badge if the directory gives you one. It is usually the difference between a free listing and a paid one, and on our side it is a single line of HTML.
• Note which directories actually sent traffic. That list is the only thing worth keeping from the whole exercise.

When you are ready, submit here — or point your coding agent at our MCP server and let it do the form.