Day one went well. Day four went bad.

The launch itself turned out better than anticipated. Stable traffic, nice feedback, a few hundred signups. I spent the night answering all of it.

Then Thursday came and traffic was at zero level. No just low but zero. For hours. There wasn't any special plan for Thursday because all the advices which I had seen were for the launch day only.

The thing which saved my week was very small. I asked every single person who signed up from me one question in my welcome letter: what was he/she doing before he/she discovered us. I received 40 responses and it took me two hours to analyze it. The result – roadmap for three months.

Next time when I will launch something I will treat my launch day as collecting that batch of responses instead of launch itself.

What did you do for the next week before the launch for people who have done this several times? There is definitely something obvious that I have missed.