🚀 Startup Launch Checklist [Updated for 2020]🚀

📚 Step #1 - Research Phase 📚

Before you start planning your launch, you need to figure out your overall product and marketing strategy.

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🌐 Step #2 - Slap Together a Website 🌐

Time to get things rolling. The next step is to create a website and create a foundation for your marketing.

📈 Step #3 - Do Some Pre-Launch Marketing 📈

If you have the extra time and resources, you can start marketing your product way before you’ve even launched. Usually, this involves the following.

Add an email capture on your landing page.
Incentivize early adopters. Offer them something extra than just a “we’re going to email you once we launch!”
Drive traffic. Usually, the best channels to use for pre-launch marketing are content marketing, SEO, and PR. More on each channel under “Ongoing Marketing” below.

🚀 Step #4 - Get Some Initial Traction 🚀

Once you have an MVP, you want to validate 2 things: that your product works, and that it can drive conversions (and hence, revenue). Here’s how to do it lean.

If you did pre-launch marketing, launch an email to anyone that pre-signed for your product.
Cold call your first 50 customers. The easiest way to get your first customers is to do some cold calling. After all, if you can’t sell your product on a one-on-one call, how will you sell it to strangers on the internet via text?
Find leads on social media. Use Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter to find leads on social media and pitch them with a direct message.
Run search ads. If you have a flexible budget, you can run search ads on direct intent keywords. E.g. if your product is a resume builder, you advertise on the keyword “resume builder.”

Only our best content, 1 email a month.

👨‍🚀 Step #5 - Prep for Launch 👨‍🚀

Every startup gets one “launch” in its lifetime. Here’s how to make sure you get it right.

Create a Press Kit and put it up on your website. Here’s an example of how to do that. This is going to be helpful for journalists who want to write about your website.
Gather a list of journalists that wrote about your competition. You’re going to email them during launch and ask for a feature. Use tools like Hunter.io or Clearbit Connect to find the journalist’s email addresses.
Create a list of all your acquaintances that use ProductHunt (PH). You’ll want to ping them and ask for support once you launch on PH (more on this in the next step).
Create a list of all your friends and acquaintances who might have connections to your target audience. You’ll reach out to them during launch.

🔥 Step #6 - LAUNCH! 🔥

Time to hit that big, shiny red button and LAUNCH!

Reach out to all the journalists you listed in the last step and pitch your product. The PoV of the pitch should be “hey, you wrote about [competitor x]. We have a similar product, but here’s how ours stands out…” To learn more about this approach, check out this article.
Launch on ProductHunt. Here’s the best guide on how to do that.
Reach out to all your friends and acquaintances we listed out in the last step, and ask for a share of your product landing page. For the best results, you should also give them the EXACT text they should use when sharing the page.

➡️ Step #7 - Ongoing Marketing ➡️

BAM, you launched. If you did everything right, you should already have some initial traction.

However, you’re far from done. In fact, you’re just getting started! From here on out, you should be doing ongoing marketing to drive growth for your startup. You can use the following marketing channels…

🔗 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) 🔗

SEO generally involves 3 things:

- Creating high-quality articles aimed at ranking for specific keywords
- Optimizing your website to Google best practices
- Getting high-quality backlinks pointed towards your website

Here's how to do all that.

📄 Content Marketing 📄

Content marketing = creating content aimed towards your target users needs / paints / problems, and promoting it to make sure that they get to read it.

E.g. if you're a resume builder SaaS, you'd create content on how to write the perfect resume.

Here's how to do content marketing:

Only our best content, 1 email a month.

🔎 Google Search Ads 🔎

Does your product already have an audience looking for it?

Then Google Ads might be the right channel for you.

The general process here is identifying keywords your ideal users use to look for similar products, and advertise on them.

First off, get some basic understanding of how Google Ads works.

Here are some of our favorite resources:

👀 PPC (or, Other Ad Channels) 👀

Since there are dozens of ad platforms on the web, this sections going to be a bit more generic.

The general goal for PPC is to set up your ad account in such a way that you're making more money than you're spending.

Create your ad campaign. Decide on the budget and campaign goal. The latter will tell the ad platform how to optimize your campaigns. E.g. should it focus on traffic that gets you sign-ups? Conversions? Traffic?
Figure out your ad targeting. Mind you, though, this doesn’t mean that you should create a customer persona and replicate it using Facebook targeting. Create several target groups w/ a handful of interests each. Test which of them performs the best.
For each target group create several ad creative variations (i.e. ad image and copy). The goal here is to see which ad works best and double down.

Looking to learn more about PPC advertising? Here are some of the best guides we’ve read:

🤝 Affiliate Marketing 🤝

Affiliate Marketing means starting a program to reward companies who drive registrations and sales to your website. Here's how to do that:

🔁 Referral Marketing 🔁

Referral marketing can significantly boost your user acquisition with ZERO added spend. Here's how you'd do that:

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