The 8-Week Startup Launch Timeline
A week-by-week plan from decision to launch day, with the deadlines that stop a launch from slipping indefinitely.
Why launches slip forever
The most common outcome for a planned launch is not failure. It is postponement — indefinitely, one feature at a time, until the launch either happens accidentally or does not happen at all.
The mechanism is always the same. Without a fixed external date, the launch is scheduled for when the product is ready, and the product is never ready. Each week produces a new reason that is individually reasonable and collectively fatal. The single most valuable thing a timeline provides is not organisation but a commitment that exists outside your own judgement.
Weeks 1–2: positioning, before anything else
Testing your one-sentence description on ten people outside the team is uncomfortable and it is the highest-value fortnight in the schedule. If they cannot repeat back what it does and who it is for, nothing downstream can compensate — not the video, not the placements, not the copy.
Discovering this in week two is cheap. Discovering it on launch day, from the pattern of comments, is expensive and too late to act on.
Weeks 3–4: the asset kit
Demo video, screenshots at consistent dimensions, logo variants, short and long descriptions, founder story, fast landing page. Every channel requests some subset of these, and producing them under deadline in the final week is how a multi-channel launch quietly collapses into a single post.
Prepared once, adapting them per destination takes minutes. That difference determines whether your launch is what you planned or what you had time for.
Week 5: book everything with a queue
Anything involving an approval, a review, or a calendar has to start now. This is also the week the launch stops being provisional, because a booked date is a commitment you have to work backwards from.
Week 6: warm the audience
The most commonly skipped step. Founders go straight from building to announcing, which means launch day is the first anyone has heard of it — converting what could have been a reminder into a cold ask, at roughly half the response rate.
Week 7: freeze
Stop shipping. Walk the full signup path on a phone, test the emails, confirm the analytics fire. Last-minute code changes are the most common cause of a broken launch day, and the marginal feature was never going to be the reason it worked.
Week 8: be present, then run the sequence
Publish in the morning, clear the day for replies, work the comments in real time. Then do the post-launch work — contact everyone who engaged, publish the results, and schedule the next moment before the spike has finished decaying.
The playbook
Weeks 1–2: Fix the positioning
Write the one-sentence description and test it on ten people outside your team. If they cannot repeat back what it does and who it is for, nothing downstream will work. This is also the cheapest time to discover the product is aimed at nobody in particular.
Weeks 3–4: Produce the asset kit
Demo video, screenshots at consistent dimensions, logo variants, short and long descriptions, founder story, and a landing page that loads fast. Every channel will request some subset of these, and producing them under deadline the week before is how launches degrade.
Week 5: Book the placements
Reserve the dated placements, submit to the listings that need lead time, and confirm the date with anyone who agreed to help. Everything with a queue or an approval step must be started now or it will not land on the day.
Week 6: Warm the audience
Tell your list, your communities, and your network that something is coming, without asking for anything yet. This converts a cold ask on launch day into a reminder, which roughly doubles the response rate.
Week 7: Rehearse and freeze
Walk the complete signup path on a phone, test the emails, check the analytics fire, and then stop shipping features. Code changes in the final week are the most common cause of a broken launch day, and the feature was never the reason it would have worked.
Week 8: Launch and stay present
Publish in the morning, clear the entire day for replies, and work the comments in real time. Then run the post-launch sequence: contact the people who engaged, publish the results, and put the next moment in the calendar.