Don’t Launch to Crickets

By: Daniel Schwartz

Right before launching at Harry’s, we created buzz around our brand with a prelaunch campaign that, to put it lightly, was pretty successful. In just under seven days, the campaign helped us gather 90K legitimate email addresses to whom we could announce our launch.

Prelaunch is an interesting time for a company. While it’s important to be thinking about getting buzz in advance of launch, at the same time you should be focusing your engineering resources on the larger task at hand: Getting your full site, bug free, out the door.

It hadn’t occurred to us to open source this project simply because we didn’t think it was that out-of-the-ordinary. Nor was it hard to build. However, after a bunch of companies reached out to us for advice on how to build and launch a prelaunch campaign, it dawned on us that in the weeks leading up to the launch of a company, time is the most precious resource.

With that in mind, we’re open sourcing our code so that you don’t have to build a prelaunch campaign from the ground up and can focus your engineering resources on the larger task at hand: Getting your full site, bug free, out the door.

While there are plenty of SaaS products out there looking to solve this problem, sometimes there’s nothing like owning all that code and data yourself, not to mention that whole free part.

Prelaunchr is what we came up with. Prelaunchr is a small and simple Rails 3.2 project that is ready to be used as a prelaunch site. It includes all the necessary requirements like prize groups, open/closed states, and simple social sharing.

Screenshots

Download

Get the code and more extensive documentation from GitHub

Originally published at engineering.harrys.com on July 21, 2014.