I've shipped three Mac apps in the past year: a token counter, a feed blocker, and a nutrition tracker. Every launch taught me something the previous one didn't.
Here's the checklist I've refined across all three. It's not theoretical — it's what I actually do the morning I hit "publish."
48 Hours Before Launch
Kill your feature list. Whatever you're still working on, stop. If it's not done 48 hours before launch, it's a post-launch update. I've delayed launches by weeks chasing "one more thing." Never again.
Write your landing page copy first. Not after the app is done. Before. If you can't explain what your app does in two sentences, you don't understand your own product yet. For TokenBar, it took me three rewrites to land on "see your LLM token spend in your menu bar." Short. Clear. Done.
Test on a clean machine. Your dev machine has a thousand things installed. Borrow a friend's laptop or spin up a fresh user account. Half of my launch-day bugs came from assumptions about my own environment.
Launch Morning
Deploy before you post. This sounds obvious, but I've seen devs post their Show HN before their download link is live. Build and notarize the night before. Wake up, verify the download works, then start posting.
Write three different descriptions. One for Twitter (short, punchy), one for dev communities (technical, problem-focused), one for Product Hunt or similar (benefit-driven). Copy-pasting the same blurb everywhere gets you ignored everywhere.
Set up basic analytics before you launch. Not a complex dashboard — just something that tells you if people are actually downloading. I spent my first launch day refreshing a page with zero tracking and had no idea if anyone cared.
The First 24 Hours
Respond to every single comment. Every one. The people who show up on day one are your earliest potential advocates. A two-sentence reply builds more goodwill than a marketing campaign.
Don't fix bugs live. Unless it's a crash-on-launch situation, write down the bug, acknowledge it publicly, and fix it tomorrow. Panic-coding on launch day introduces worse bugs than the ones you're fixing.
Screenshot everything. Traffic spikes, nice comments, download numbers. You'll want this for motivation on the days when nothing is happening (which is most days as a solo dev).
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most of this checklist isn't about code. It's about communication, preparation, and emotional management. The code is done — you already handled that. Launch day is a marketing and psychology problem.
The biggest lesson across three launches: the app you ship is less important than the story you tell about it. A mediocre landing page kills a great app. A great landing page saves an okay one.
Ship it. Tell the story. Respond to humans. Repeat.
I build small Mac utilities as a solo dev. TokenBar tracks your LLM token spending from the menu bar. If you're shipping your own thing, I'd love to hear what's on your launch day checklist.
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