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Startup Launch Checklist
📚Step #1 - Research Phase📚
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Before you start planning your launch, you need to figure
out your overall product and marketing strategy.
Create a list of competitors in your niche & include the following:
Competitor Name
Link
Pricing Options
Key Features
Define your product & business.
What’s your business model?
What’s your pricing model?
How many pricing tiers do you offer?
Do you offer a free trial?
Is your product freemium?
Which key features are you going to focus on for launch?
What’s your differentiator? How are you going to beat the existing
products on the market?
Spy on your competitors and figure out which marketing channels are
getting them the best results.
📄Content Marketing📄 Do they publish blog posts on a regular
basis? Do they promote their content on social media? Do they get a
lot of Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn shares?
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🔗Search Engine Optimization🔗 Do they have good rankings on
Google with their blog posts? Do their landing pages rank on product
search terms? You can check this by running their website through
SEMrush or Ahrefs.
🔎Search Ads🔎 Are they running ads on Google Search? You can
check this by running their site through SEMrush.
👀Facebook Ads👀 Are they running ads on Facebook? You can check
this through Facebook Ad Library.
🤝Affiliate Marketing🤝 Check their website footer to see if they have
an affiliate page up. You can also do this through a simple search
query: “site:[competitor website] affiliate program.”
🔁Referral Marketing🔁 You can usually find this in the footer. Check
what kind of referral terms your competitors offer.
Now, if you're planning on raising money, use all of the above to slap
together a bad-ass pitch deck.
🌐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
Pick a domain name. Pro-tip, all the good “.com”s are taken. Go for
something more creative like a .io, .xyz, or other TLD. We recommend
using NameSilo for buying the actual domains, they don’t do pricegouging, unlike most providers.
Buy hosting. We recommend using SiteGround - they have 99.99% server
up time, and their customer support is amazing.
Pick an email marketing provider. It doesn’t particularly matter which one.
We usually recommend MailChimp since it’s free for up to 2,000
subscribers.
Create relevant social profiles. The key here is relevant. If you’re a B2B
enterprise software company, you really don’t need an Instagram profile
where you post selfies. Usually, most startups go for Facebook, LinkedIn,
and Twitter.
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Create a landing page for your product. You’ll need to create a landing
page that sells your product. In 99% of cases, we recommend using
WordPress. It’s going to allow you to be a LOT leaner than having your
tech team code your entire website from scratch.
Create other essential web pages. E.g. about us, contact us, pricing
page.Set up a payment processor. We’d recommend Stripe (the best option
on the market) or PayPal (if you really have to).
Set up a payment processor. We’d recommend Stripe (the best option on
the market) or PayPal (if you really have to).
Set up Analytics. You can pick between Google Analytics, MixPanel, or
other alternatives.
Set up a business email. We recommend using G Suite. Dealing with your
hosting provider’s email service will be a pain when scaling.
Launch a blog. If you’re planning on using content marketing or SEO for
your marketing (which, in 2020, most product companies do), you’ll need a
blog.
📈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
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hence, revenue). Here’s how to do it lean.
If you did pre-launch marketing, launch an email to anyone that presigned 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.”
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!
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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…
SEO
Content Marketing
Google Ads
PPC
Affiliate Marketing
Referral Marketing
We're going to deep-dive on how to do it down below!
🔗SEO🔗
SEO generally involves 3 things:
- Creating high-quality articles aimed at ranking for specific
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keywords
- Optimizing your website to Google best practices
- Getting high-quality backlinks pointed towards your
website
Here's how to do all that.
Create a list of your competitors that have good rankings on Google
Do some keyword research. Come up with keywords that you want to
rank for with your blog content (e.g. topics surrounding your product), as
well as your landing pages (e.g. direct search terms people use to find
your product). You can use the following tools for this:
UberSuggest
SEMrush
Google Keyword Planner
Optimize all your web pages for SEO. You can use one of the following
tools:
Using WordPress? RankMath or Yoast
Otherwise, check this out
Publish SEO-optimized content on the reg. Here’s how to do that…
How to Learn SEO in 2020
Our SEO Process - How To Reach 200,000 Monthly Traffic
SEO Copywriting: 17 Powerful Secrets Updated)
Create landing pages for each of your use-case.
How to Rank (and Convert) with Landing Page SEO
The simple guide to SEO for your landing pages
Do link-building on the reg. Here’s the complete list of all the possible
tactics you can use.
📄Content Marketing📄
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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:
Learn some basics of content marketing. The general process, though,
involves creating and promoting content to drive traffic and leads to your
product.
Come up with (potentially viral) content ideas. You can use the following
tactics for that:
Find viral content in your niche with BuzzSumo
Reverse-engineer the best content ever published on Hacker News
Borrow content ideas from some of the best posts on Reddit. To do
this, find the most active subreddit for your niche, and check for the
most popular content published there. E.g. for /r/entrepreneur.
Create a list of channels you can use to promote your content. Some of
our favorites include:
Facebook groups. Whatever your niche might be, there’s probably a
ton of Facebook groups around it. If you’re in the SaaS,
entrepreneurship, or marketing niche, check out our list of 100 best
groups.
Reddit. Find the most popular communities for your niche, and repost
your content there. Keep in mind, though, that for most subreddits, you
have to reformat your blog post to fit the Reddit post format (and NOT
just submit a link to your blog)
Niche communities. E.g. Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, etc.
On a weekly basis, create 12 new, high-quality content pieces. Here’s
our favorite guide on how to create good content.
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For each content piece you publish, look for people who wrote about
similar topics, and reach out to them asking for a share.
Read some case studies
How Chris Von Wilpert made $100,000 from a single blog post
How Mint.com used content marketing to grow to 1.5 million users
How to Execute the Skyscraper Technique (and Get Results)
🔎Google 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:
Google Search Ads Training
AdEspresso Search Ad Guides
Isaac Rudansky’s Search Ad Tutorials
Then, here's our Google Ads checklist:
Find the keywords you want to run ads on. You can use Google Keyword
Planner for this. We recommend finding keywords around your product’s
main use-case and running ads on those.
Decide on your budget. This is a lot easier than you’d think - check what’s
the average CPC for your keywords, decide on the # of clicks you want to
buy in order to see if you’re getting a positive ROI or not and calculate the
budget accordingly. Alternatively, you can just use our PPC calculator.
Create a landing page for each (significantly different) keyword. E.g. if
you’re advertising on “workflow software,” your landing page should have
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“workflow software” as a keyword sprinkled all around (and NOT “business
process management software” or any other synonym).
Create 3 ad copies for each keyword you’ll target.
Pick the right location, device type, and demographics options for your
ad account. E.g. if you’re selling a very expensive product, you’d probably
want to avoid countries with lower income.
Use granular ad groups. I.e. each ad set should have 1 keyword. While this
is harder to manage, it gives you better control and flexibility over your
ads.
Use Cascading Bids. I.e. bid lower for broad match keywords, and higher
for exact match keywords.
Add negative keywords. That’s keywords you DON’T want your ads to
show up on. When you’re using broad match keywords, Google
automatically shows your ads to associated keywords (which often-times,
can be irrelevant).
Use as many ad extensions as you can.
Use ad rotation. Meaning, Google will automatically figure out which of
your ad copies work best and run those.
On an ongoing basis, keep track of your account and make adjustments
when needed (try new keywords, add negative keywords, experiment w/
different ad copies, etc.)
Add conversion goals to keep track of your conversions.
👀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
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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:
Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Advertising
Facebook Remarketing Guide
The Ultimate List of Facebook Ads Case Studies (+ 38 lessons you can’t
ignore)
How to Setup LinkedIn Remarketing
My experience running Facebook ads and my cheat sheet on how to make
them work for you
Complete Guide to Look-Alike Audiences
🤝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:
Decide on your affiliate program structure. Meaning, you need to figure
out:
What’s the % you’re going to offer to your affiliate
Are you going to offer a different % based on the # of signups an
affiliate drives?
Is the affiliate bonus going to be a one-time thing, or recurring?
Decide on the technical solution. Here are some options:
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Create your own affiliate software. Obviously, this is very timeconsuming and expensive, so we wouldn’t recommend.
Using WordPress? You can try Affiliate WP
If you’re not, any of the following options are nice: TapAffiliate, Post
Affiliate Pro.
Create a landing page for the affiliate program. Include a link to it on your
site header or footer
Reach out to potential affiliate marketing partners. For example:
Influencers
Bloggers
Affiliate blogs (i.e. blogs that review the best products in your niche)
🔁Referral Marketing🔁
Referral marketing can significantly boost your user
acquisition with ZERO added spend. Here's how you'd do
that:
Decide on your referral marketing structure. What does the referrer and
the referee get? Some options here are:
Discount to the product
Product credit. Meaning, credit they can only use for your product
Offer cash. PayPal is famous for this referral tactic strategy
Setup a referral marketing program. You can use one of the following tools
for that:
Referral Candy
Prelaunchr
Invite Box
Create a landing page for the referral program and include it in your
header or footer
Reach out to your existing users and let them know about your referral
program. You can do this by sending out a mass email to your subscribers
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and users.
To learn more about referral marketing, check out:
How to Build a Customer Referral Program
An Epic List of 80 Referral Program Examples
Page inspired by
Side Project Checklist
.
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