Phase 10: Launching

In one line: Personal projects don't need formal launches. Tell friends, post a few places, write about why you built it. The product matters more than the launch.

In plain English

At a big company, "launch" is a coordinated event with press, marketing, and a war room. For an indie project, it's a tweet and a Hacker News post. The thing that actually determines whether anyone uses your project is the product itself, not the launch performance. Don't agonize over launch day.

Where to soft-launch

Personal projects don't need a "launch" the way enterprise products do. You can soft-launch by:

1. Telling friends.
2. Posting on Twitter / Bluesky / Mastodon / Threads.
3. Writing a blog post about why you built it.
4. Posting to Hacker News (with a "Show HN: " title).
5. Posting to Reddit (relevant subreddits).
6. Posting to Product Hunt.
7. Posting to Indie Hackers.

Don't overthink launches. The product matters more than the launch.

Pricing (For SaaS)

A common starting point:

• Free tier: Enough for a single individual to use (limited capacity).
• Paid tier: $5–15/month for the full experience.
• Annual discount: 2 months free.

Stripe handles the actual billing.

Marketing Site

If you're selling, you need a landing page that explains:

• What it does (hero section, one sentence).
• Who it's for (subheadline).
• Why it's better than alternatives (3-4 differentiators).
• What it looks like (screenshots or video).
• Pricing (transparent, simple).
• Social proof (if any).
• CTA (sign up / try free).

For inspiration, look at landing pages of indie SaaS products on Indie Hackers.

Worked example: a "Show HN" post that worked

A good Show HN title and body look like:

Show HN: ShelfTrack — book tracking without the social network

I built ShelfTrack because Goodreads has become unbearable — ads, social features I don't want, and a slow UI. ShelfTrack is just my reading shelf: add a book, mark it as reading/finished/wishlist, rate it, see the list. No followers, no feed.

Stack: Next.js, Postgres on Neon, Clerk for auth, deployed on Vercel. Built in about three weekends. Free tier handles a personal library of any size; $5/month for unlimited shelves and export.

Would love feedback on the onboarding flow specifically — it's the part I'm least sure about.

The pattern: clear problem, clear solution, honest stack/effort, specific feedback request. The HN crowd rewards honesty and punishes marketing-speak.

Highlight: the product is the launch

A great launch of a mediocre product gets you a spike of traffic and then crickets. A mediocre launch of a great product gets you slow but compounding growth. If you have limited weekend time, spend the bulk of it on the product, not on launch-day choreography.

Common mistakes

Where people commonly trip up

• Treating launch day as a one-shot event. You burn a Saturday on a Show HN, get 80 visitors, no signups, and conclude the project flopped. The fix is to schedule three or four soft-launches a few weeks apart — different channels, different angles. Each one teaches you what the landing page is missing.
• Posting Show HN with marketing copy. "Revolutionizing the way readers track their books" gets buried in seven minutes. The fix is the format on this page: one-line problem, one-line solution, honest stack and effort, a specific feedback ask. HN reliably rewards plain talk and punishes spin.
• Launching with no pricing page. A free product looks fine until someone asks "is this going to stay free?" and bounces because the answer is unclear. The fix is to ship a pricing page on day one even if you're 100% free — say "free during beta, paid tier coming" and put the future price on the page.
• Going dark after launch. You post on a Saturday, get fifteen comments by Sunday morning, sleep in, and the thread is cold by noon. The fix is to set aside the first 24 hours to reply — answer every question, thank every signup, post about bugs you fix. Engagement during the window is the whole point.
• Counting traffic instead of activation. 2,000 visitors and three signups means your landing page is the problem, not the product. The fix is to instrument signup-to-first-action before you launch, so the post-mortem points at a specific funnel step instead of a vague "it didn't work."

Page checkpoint

Checkpoint Quiz

Did the launching advice stick?

Required

What's next

→ Continue to Phase 11: Maintenance where the work changes from "build" to "watch, respond, iterate."