Most developers spend weeks or months building something, then rush through the launch in a single afternoon. They tweet about it, post on a few forums, and then wonder why nobody shows up. The product is solid, but everything around it is an afterthought.
I've done this myself. I've also watched dozens of other developers make the same mistakes. Here's what gets forgotten most often.
A way for users to tell you what's broken
You launch. Something breaks. A user hits the bug, gets frustrated, and leaves. You have no idea this happened because there's no error tracking, no feedback widget, nothing. You find out three weeks later when someone finally emails you.
Set up error monitoring before you launch. Sentry takes maybe 20 minutes to integrate and will save you from silent failures. But error tracking only catches crashes. It doesn't catch confusing UI, missing features, or workflows that just don't make sense to real people.
You need a way for users to actually tell you what's wrong or what they wish existed. I think this is so important that I built my own tool for it called UserJot. But even a simple feedback form is better than nothing. The point is giving users a voice that isn't your personal email inbox.
Analytics that answer real questions
Everyone sets up Google Analytics and thinks they're done. Then they realize GA tells you almost nothing useful about a web app. You know people visited. You don't know what they did.
Set up something like PostHog, Mixpanel, or Amplitude. Track the specific actions that matter for your product. Did they complete onboarding? Did they create their first project? Did they invite a teammate? These are the numbers that tell you if your product is working, not pageviews.
The developers who skip this end up making decisions based on gut feeling and a handful of anecdotes from users who happened to email them. That's not a strategy.
A landing page that actually explains the product
Developers love building features. They hate writing copy. So you end up with a landing page that says something vague like "the modern platform for teams" with a screenshot that doesn't explain anything.
Your landing page needs to answer one question in about five seconds: what does this thing do and why would I want it? A confused visitor isn't going to dig through your docs to figure it out. They'll just leave.
Write a headline that a stranger could understand. Show the product in action, not just abstract UI mockups. Include at least one testimonial, even if it's from a beta user. Make the signup button obvious. This isn't complicated, but it's easy to skip when you're excited to ship.
A way to contact users after they sign up
A lot of developers treat email like spam and refuse to collect it. Or they collect emails but never actually send anything. Then when they ship a major update or fix a critical bug, they have no way to tell their users.
At minimum, you need transactional emails working. Password resets, account confirmations, that kind of thing. But you should also have a way to announce updates. This could be a changelog, a newsletter, or both.
The developers who do this well end up with users who stick around because they see the product improving. The developers who skip it have users who sign up, forget about the product, and never come back.
A plan for what happens after launch day
Launch day is a spike. Maybe you get on Hacker News or Product Hunt and traffic goes crazy for 24 hours. Then it's over and you're back to zero.
The developers who build real traction have a plan for the weeks after launch. They have content scheduled. They have communities they're active in. They have a list of people to reach out to. They treat launch as the beginning of marketing, not the end.
If your entire strategy is "launch and hope it goes viral," you're going to be disappointed. Viral moments are rare and unpredictable. Consistent effort over months is what actually works for most products.
The pattern I see over and over
The developers who struggle aren't building bad products. They're building good products and then treating everything else as optional. Marketing is optional. Feedback collection is optional. Analytics are optional. User communication is optional.
Then they wonder why nobody is signing up.
The product is maybe 30% of the work. The other 70% is everything around it: positioning, distribution, user communication, feedback loops, iteration based on real data. Skip that and you're just building in a vacuum.
If any of this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Most developers learn this the hard way. The good news is that none of it is particularly difficult to fix. It just requires actually doing it before you launch instead of promising yourself you'll add it later.
You won't add it later. Add it now.
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