Product Launch skill for Claude Code

A launch done well puts a working, ready product in front of the people most likely to care, through the channels they already use, with every asset and system prepared before the day — and measures signups and activation, not upvotes. A launch is a spike; the plan must also say where that attention goes afterward.

Ground rules

• Tier the launch first. Not every release deserves a Product Hunt day; over-launching trains your audience to ignore you.
• Readiness beats hype: onboarding, pricing, docs, billing, and monitoring must work before anyone is invited. A broken signup on launch day burns your best traffic.
• Follow each community’s rules. Product Hunt and Hacker News both prohibit vote solicitation and penalize voting rings; ask people to look and give feedback, never to upvote.
• One clear message across every asset: who it is for, what it does, why now.
• The owner of the product (founder or lead engineer) is present on launch day to answer questions in person. Canned replies hurt more than silence.
• Production deploys, DNS changes, and pricing changes on launch day require explicit user confirmation and a rollback plan; prefer shipping the product days before the announcement.

Launch tiers

Tier	What	Channels
1 — Major	New product, v1.0, major pivot, pricing model change	Everything: PH, HN, email to all, blog, press, social, partners, in-app
2 — Significant	Notable feature that changes who can use the product or why	Blog + changelog, email to relevant segments, social, in-app, maybe Show HN if technical
3 — Incremental	Improvements, integrations, fixes	Changelog, in-app note, one social post

Workflow

- [ ] 1. Set tier, audience, goal metrics, and date
- [ ] 2. Write the message (positioning core)
- [ ] 3. Build the timeline and owners
- [ ] 4. Prepare assets
- [ ] 5. Prepare channels (PH, HN, email, social, partners, press)
- [ ] 6. Readiness checks (product, infra, support)
- [ ] 7. Run launch day
- [ ] 8. Follow up and measure

1. Tier, audience, goals, date

• Primary audience (one sentence) and where they gather online.
• Goal metrics with targets: signups, activated accounts, trials → paid, waitlist conversions, qualified demo requests. Upvotes and impressions are diagnostics only.
• Date: avoid major holidays, big industry events, and days when a dominant competitor or platform announces. Tuesday–Thursday is a common default for B2B audiences.

2. Message

<Product> helps <audience> <do outcome> by <how>. Unlike <alternative>, <differentiator>.
Available <today / pricing / free tier>.

Derive the one-liner (≤ 60 characters, e.g. for the Product Hunt tagline), the 25-word description, and the 3 key benefits from it. Hand page copy to landing-page-copy.

3. Timeline (tier 1)

When	Work
T-6 to T-4 weeks	Message, landing page, pricing final; recruit beta users for quotes; book demo video recording; build waitlist
T-3 weeks	Draft blog post, email, social posts, press kit; prepare Product Hunt page draft; line up partner/integration co-announcements
T-2 weeks	Product feature-complete; load test signup and core flows; write support macros and FAQ; brief the team
T-1 week	Final assets reviewed; schedule emails; prepare PH launch scheduled for 12:01 a.m. Pacific; dry-run onboarding with 5 fresh users
T-2 days	Code freeze for launch surfaces; dashboards and alerts ready; on-call rota set
Launch day	Publish in order (below); respond to every comment; monitor
T+1 to T+3 days	Thank-you posts with numbers or learnings; follow-up email to signups; fix top issues publicly
T+2 weeks	Retrospective: goals vs. actuals, activation of launch cohort, channel attribution

Tier 2 compresses this to ~2 weeks; tier 3 to a day.

4. Assets

• Landing page with a clear CTA and working signup; OG image (1200×630) and title/description verified with a link preview debugger.
• Demo video: 60–120 s, shows the product doing the job in the first 10 s, captions burned in or attached.
• Screenshots / GIFs at native resolution; Product Hunt gallery images (1270×760 is the commonly used size; check the current PH spec).
• Launch blog post: problem, what you built, how it works, who it is for, pricing, what is next.
• Changelog entry (see changelog-release-notes) and docs updated.
• Email to existing users/waitlist, segmented by relevance.
• Social posts for founders’ and team profiles (see social-media-posts).
• Press kit: logo files (SVG/PNG, light/dark), founder bios and photos, fact sheet, screenshots, contact.
• In-app announcement for existing users.
• UTM-tagged links per channel (utm_source=producthunt, utm_source=hn, utm_source=newsletter).

5. Channels

Product Hunt

• Self-hunting is normal; a hunter is optional. Launches go live at 12:01 a.m. Pacific and the daily leaderboard runs for 24 hours Pacific time.
• Page: name, tagline (≤ 60 chars), description, gallery (lead with the strongest visual or video), topics, maker accounts for the team, first comment from the maker explaining the why, what’s new, and a specific question for feedback.
• Featuring on the homepage is curated; not every launch is featured. Quality of the product page and maker engagement matter.
• Tell your community you are live and link to the page asking for feedback. Do not ask for upvotes, do not buy votes, do not send direct links to vote from new accounts.
• Offer a PH-specific perk only if genuine (extended trial, discount code).

Hacker News (Show HN)

• Show HN is for something people can try now: a working product, tool, or open-source project. Not landing pages, waitlists, fundraising news, or blog posts.
• Remove friction: a live demo or no-signup trial, or a GitHub repo with a quick start.
• Title: Show HN: <Name> – <plain description of what it is>; no superlatives, no marketing language.
• Add a text comment from the maker: what it is, why you built it, how it works technically, what is rough, what feedback you want.
• Never ask for upvotes or share the direct link for voting; HN detects and penalizes voting rings. Do not post repeatedly; if it does not take off, moderators sometimes offer a second chance.
• Answer every technical question candidly, including criticism. “Launch HN” is reserved for Y Combinator companies.

Email, social, partners, press

• Email existing users first (they convert best); founders’ personal profiles outperform company pages on social.
• Relevant communities (subreddits, Discord, Slack groups): read each community’s self-promotion rules; post where allowed, as a participant, with context.
• Press: pitch 1–2 weeks ahead with an embargo; target journalists who covered the space recently; most early-stage launches get more from communities than press.

6. Readiness checks

• Signup, onboarding, billing, and password reset tested end-to-end in production by someone who has not used the product.
• Load test of landing page and signup at 10x normal peak; CDN caching on static pages; rate limits on expensive endpoints.
• Error tracking, uptime monitor, and dashboard for signups/activation live.
• Feature flag or kill switch for the new feature; rollback steps written.
• Support inbox staffed; FAQ and macros ready; status page available.
• Analytics events for the launch funnel verified (see analytics-tracking-plan).

7. Launch day run sheet

00:01 PT  Product Hunt goes live → maker first comment posted
06:00 PT  Show HN post (if tier 1 and the product is try-able); maker comment
07:00 PT  Blog post published; changelog; in-app announcement
08:00 PT  Email to users/waitlist (batched if large)
08:30 PT  Founder and team social posts; partner posts
All day   Reply to every PH/HN comment and social reply within ~30 min
          Watch error rates, signup funnel, support queue hourly
17:00 PT  Team check-in: top issues, fixes shipped, notes for the follow-up post

Adjust times to the audience’s timezone; the PH day is fixed to Pacific time.

8. Follow up and measure

• Follow-up email to launch signups within 24–48 hours that drives the activation step.
• Publicly ship fixes for issues raised on launch day and say so in the threads.
• Retrospective with this table:

Channel	Visits	Signups	Activated (7d)	Paid (30d)	Notes

Compare against the goals from step 1. Record what to repeat and what to drop.

Gotchas

• Launching a product that still needs a sales call or waitlist on PH/HN wastes the spike.
• Asking friends to upvote via direct links gets PH launches penalized and HN posts flagged.
• Big-bang deploy on launch morning: ship days earlier behind a flag; launch day is marketing, not engineering.
• Attention fades in 48–72 hours. Without onboarding emails and a reason to return, launch cohorts churn fastest.
• Measuring success by leaderboard rank. A #5 product of the day with strong activation beats a #1 with empty accounts.

Output: launch plan

# Launch plan — <product/feature> (Tier <n>), launch <date>
Audience: <...> · Message: <one-liner> · Goals: <metric targets>
Owners: <launch lead, PH/HN responder, email, social, infra on-call, support>

## Timeline
<table from step 3 with dates and owners>

## Assets checklist
<step 4 checklist with status>

## Channel plan
<per channel: copy link, time, owner, UTM>

## Readiness
<step 6 checklist with status>

## Run sheet
<step 7 times>

## Measurement
<retrospective table and date>