Launch Playbook 2026: Every Checklist From Prep to Badge

This is the whole launch on one page: the prerequisites to clear before you pick a date, the account and listing checks for ShipX, search and analytics setup, ready-to-send messages for friends and groups, the badge, and a runbook for launch week and the month after. Every checklist is tickable, and your progress is saved in this browser, so you can come back to it as the date gets closer.

How to use this playbook

Work from top to bottom. The first four checklists are gates: they make up the readiness score above. Once it passes 80%, you’re ready to book a launch week. Work through the rest as the date gets closer.

1. Prerequisites: is the product ready?

The cheapest problems to fix are the ones no stranger has seen yet. Before you think about launch platforms, answer one question honestly: can someone who has never heard of you sign up and get value without talking to you?

Watch five to ten people from your target audience try it while they share their screen. Note where they hesitate and which words they use for the problem; those words belong in your headline. If they can’t finish the core task alone, fixing that is this week’s work, not the launch post.

2. Check your ShipX account

ShipX is for makers with fewer than 1000 followers on X. You sign in with X, and we read your follower count from the official X API on our servers, so it can’t be typed in or edited. It’s checked again when you submit a launch, so sign in early rather than on launch morning.

You also need a verified email address to launch. A complete maker profile is optional, but it’s the first thing curious visitors click: a photo, a one-line headline and a couple of links show there’s a real person behind the product who’ll answer questions.

Weeks run Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59 UTC and each has a limited number of free slots, so book yours early. You can move or withdraw a launch until it goes live. See how launch weeks work.

3. Prepare your listing

To launch you need a name, tagline, logo, website, description, at least one screenshot, a category, a pricing model and a platform. Everything else is optional, but it still matters: ranking includes a listing quality score that rewards a complete listing (screenshots, a demo, problem and solution, categories, tags and tech stack). It won’t beat real engagement, but it helps, and a complete page turns more visitors into users.

Write the tagline for a stranger scrolling past: “Voice notes that turn into searchable docs” beats “The future of thinking”. You can start your listing now and save it as a draft, then finish it over a few evenings.

4. Set up search and analytics

Launch traffic fades within days. Search traffic keeps coming for years, but only once search engines can find, crawl and index your site. Set this up now, so the visitors and links from launch week land on a site Google and Bing already know about.

Google Search Console

1. Add a Domain property (it covers http, https, www and every subdomain) and verify it with the DNS TXT record Google gives you.
2. Under Sitemaps, submit https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Paste your homepage into URL Inspection and click Request indexing. Do the same for your pricing page and any key landing pages.
4. Check back after a few days: the Pages report shows what’s indexed, and why anything isn’t.

Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow

Sign in and import your sites from Search Console in one click, with no second verification. Bing’s index also feeds DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and several AI assistants that search the web, so it matters more than its market share suggests. Then add an IndexNow key: a small text file on your domain that lets you tell Bing and other participating search engines about new or changed pages as soon as you publish them.

Analytics you’ll actually read

Pick one tool. Plausible, Umami and Vercel Web Analytics are light and cookie-free; GA4 is there if you need its depth. Then track the two events that matter: signup and your activation moment (first project created, first export, first invite). Page views alone can’t tell you whether launch week worked.

Tag every link you post with UTM parameters, one per channel, so “direct” doesn’t swallow half your traffic. When people click through to your site from ShipX, the link carries ?ref=shipx.live (unless it already has UTM tags), so analytics tools that read ref, such as Plausible, show ShipX as its own source. Your ShipX analytics show the other side: views, unique visitors, website clicks and where they came from.

5. Share with friends and groups

You don’t need a big audience. You need the people who already know you to hear about it, personally. Thirty friends, former colleagues and group members who each get a message written for them will do more for a launch than a thousand followers who scroll past one post.

• Ask for feedback, not votes. “Is it clear what it does?” gets honest replies and real conversations. “Please upvote” gets ignored, and on ShipX buying or trading supports is against the rules and gets detected.
• One person at a time. A message written to someone beats a broadcast list every time.
• Only groups you’re part of. Read the rules, post once, and stay to answer replies. Drive-by links get removed, and they’re remembered.
• Say you made it. “I built this” earns more goodwill than a link dressed up as a discovery.
• Spread it across the week. Recent supports count extra in ranking, and final positions are frozen when the week ends on Sunday. A wave on Monday and another mid-week beats sending everything at once.

Fill in the share kit once and every message is ready to send, each with its own tagged link:

6. Add and verify the ShipX badge

Every product launched on ShipX gets a “Featured on ShipX” badge for its own site. It’s worth the two minutes: once we find the badge on your homepage, the website link on your ShipX product page becomes a normal, followable link instead of a tracked redirect, so search engines can follow it to your site.

1. Enter your product slug below, or go straight to your dashboard, and pick the style that suits your site.
2. Paste the HTML into your homepage footer or an “as featured on” section. The dashboard also gives you a prompt to paste into your coding assistant, which installs it the right way.
3. Deploy, then open your dashboard and click Verify. We load your homepage and look for the badge link.

Your product slug or ShipX link

LightDark

<a href="https://shipx.live/products/your-product?ref=badge" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
  <img src="https://shipx.live/api/badge/your-product" alt="Featured on ShipX" width="176" height="54" loading="lazy" />
</a>

Copy HTMLVerify in your dashboard

If verification fails

• It isn’t live yet. We open your homepage like a visitor, running its JavaScript, so React and Vite sites work. Publish the change first, and check the badge shows on your homepage in a private window.
• It’s on the wrong page. We check the homepage of the website in your listing. Put the badge there, not only on a subpage.
• Bot protection blocked us. Firewalls and “are you human?” challenges can stop the check. Allow it through, then verify again.
• The slug doesn’t match. The link must point at your own product page. Copy it from the dashboard rather than typing it.

Keep the code as given: don’t add rel="nofollow" or extra UTM tags, and keep ?ref=badge. We re-check verified badges every week. A short outage on your side won’t cost you the verified status, but removing the badge will, so leave it up after launch.

7. Launch week prep (T-7 to T-1)

The seven days before going live are for freezing scope and rehearsing. Only fix what blocks signup or payment; everything else goes on a list for after the launch.

8. The launch-week runbook

A ShipX launch runs for a whole ISO week, not 24 hours. That gives you room to sleep, and it means the week rewards steady attention more than one frantic morning.

If you book the current week, you go live straight away. Start from the second row and stretch the rest over the days that are left.

When something breaks

1. Say so publicly within minutes.
2. Fix or roll back. Don’t debug live at peak traffic.
3. Follow up with the people it affected.
4. Write up what happened and put it in your changelog.

Handled well, an outage earns more trust than a flawless launch nobody talks about.

9. After launch: weeks 1–4

Most makers stop on day two. The four weeks after launch decide whether it was a step up or a blip. Your ShipX page stays live and indexable after the week ends, with its final position, so keep sending people to it.

What to measure, and what to ignore

Upvotes, impressions and rank feel good and predict little. A top spot with a 0.5% signup rate is a loss; a quiet week with ten activated users is a start. Treat these numbers as rules of thumb and compare them with your own beta.

Mistakes that sink launches

• Launching before strangers can use it. Praise from friends isn’t activation data.
• Asking for votes instead of feedback. It breaks the rules and teaches people to ignore you.
• One message to every group at once. It reads as spam, and you can’t answer everyone.
• No analytics. Without tagged links and a signup event, you’ll be guessing which channel worked.
• Leaving search for later. Indexing takes time; start in month three and you build momentum twice.
• Going quiet after day one. Replies, thank-yous and changelogs are free retention.

Your next step: scroll back up, tick what’s true today, and fix the first unticked gate. When readiness passes 80%, book your ShipX launch week.