The part of launch prep you cannot compress
There were two clocks running on our launch and only one of them was under our control.
The product clock compresses. Working build, landing page, payments, guidelines. All of that is a checklist and you move it faster by putting more hours in. We had that side finished.
The audience clock does not compress. On the day, ours ran a long stretch with no comments from anyone outside the team while the maker was answering everything within minutes. No amount of launch week effort fixes that, because the people who show up are the ones you were already talking to.
We sent no DMs at all. What is worth noting is that every comment came from someone who already knew what we were building, not from anyone contacted that morning.
So the question is not how many weeks before launch you start preparing. It is how long you have been somewhere before you needed anything from it.
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WebCurate.co
I agree with that.
You can speed up building the product, but you can't speed up building trust or an audience. Those things usually take months of consistently showing up and sharing what you're working on. Launch day mostly reveals the work you've already done before the launch.
@hosseinyazdi Agreed, and the part I underrated is that the two clocks bill the same hours.
Showing up in public and building the thing compete for the same evening, and the product wins that fight every time because it looks like progress. So people do not arrive at launch day ignorant of the audience half. They arrive having spent every hour on the half that moves when you push it.
The number that made it concrete for us: the product that finished top ten in our category that day started with roughly four times our product followers. That gap was set before either launch page went live, and nothing we did on the day touched it.
Did you build WebCurate's audience alongside the product, or did one of them have to wait?