Launch & Pre-Marketing

Most launches fail quietly because they start on launch day. By then the work is over: the founders who get a spike of signups spent the ninety days before ship building an audience, a waitlist, and a set of supporters ready to show up. The pattern is well documented — First Round Review and Lenny's Newsletter have chronicled again and again that pre-launch demand, not launch-day tactics, is what separates a real launch from a tree falling in an empty forest. Building in public compounds it: shipping openly turns your process into content and your early followers into a launch-day audience. These playbooks cover the whole arc — the week-by-week pre-launch plan, building a waitlist with no product, turning build-in-public into demand, running a Product Hunt launch that converts, keeping post-launch momentum, and earning press with no budget — so ship day is the payoff of a campaign, not a coin flip.