Before You Launch

I’ve now helped dozens of teams get ready for a first product launch in Area 120. This is the advice I usually give a bit in advance of the big day. It applies to web and mobile apps.

1. Separate your Analytics

Don’t mix development and production usage in analytics. In the early stages of your product, when you don’t have a lot of users, your team will be accessing your site or app more in aggregate than your users do. Your usage will skew the results. Set up a new property ID in Google Analytics for production usage.

2. Good URLs

Make sure your URLs are short and readable. This will help with virality and SEO. Remember that Google Analytics cuts off URLs at the # on default, so if you’re using fragments, you won’t be able to track them.

3. Test SSL

Developers usually develop on localhost or a test server that already has a properly configured SSL certificate. It’s easy to forget testing the SSL setup on the production domain.

4. Set Up and Test Funnels

Make sure you set up a Google Analytics or Firebase funnel for at least the onboarding flow of your app. Test thoroughly as funnels are easy to misconfigure: Funnels in Google Analytics require that each step is completed in order. If you add a superfluous or optional step, the funnel will be dropping users that actually converted, rendering the data useless.

5. Add Annotations in Google Analytics

Mark important events such as your launch, or new versions of the site, in Google Analytics with annotations. This will help you correlate what’s happening in your product with new changes you’ve pushed.

6. Add Open Graph tags

Your website might be shared with others on social channels like Facebook and Twitter, or messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp. Your link will format a lot better if you add Open Graph tags. People usually forget to add these before launch because it’s rare that you share links to your dev instance.

7. Allow Open-Ended Feedback

Somewhere in the app or site, there should be a box for users to type in open-ended feedback that users can type in. Don’t bother with surveys and trying to calculate NPS scores: You won’t have enough data for the results to be significant. Users who will bother actually writing you will have useful and actionable feedback.

8. Manage Expectations

It’s not going to be a hit yet. The point of launching an early version is to learn, not to gain massive user adoption. Launching will also lift team morale because for the first time, you’ve produced something together that real people can use. Expect learnings, not miracles.