Since early August, I’d been toying with the idea of taking poketto.me “out of beta.” But with travel planned for late September through mid-October, timing became critical. I needed to launch before leaving, so I set “early September” as the latest possible date—giving myself at least two weeks to handle any post-launch chaos.
The first question I asked: What does “launch” actually mean? What’s different afterwards?
Here’s what came to mind:
👉 The “beta” tag is removed everywhere (product, website, app store listings)
👉 Save–tag–read works flawlessly (all beta-reported issues resolved)
👉 The “highlights” feature works on both web and mobile
👉 The “personal podcasts” feature is available to all users
👉 The Android app is live in the Play Store (partly outside my control—Google can be slow here)
🤨 But.. what about the News Feeds feature, about fulltext search, about an iOS app?
Working backwards from this revealed a long list of tasks:
👉 Implement all missing features
👉 Enforce quotas and usage restrictions for personal podcasts (see TIL #88)
👉 Give users a simple upgrade path when they hit those limits
👉 Finalize pricing (TIL #88) and publish it both on the website and in the product
Then came communication tasks:
👉 Email all beta participants (ideally with a video + an incentive to try new features)
👉 Overhaul the website–but to what degree?
👉 Generate some buzz—ideally get influencers, bloggers, or journalists to cover the launch
I mapped all of these (and more) into a preliminary launch checklist. Quickly, I realized I wouldn’t be able to do it all—so I had to prioritize.
My method: a simple RAG scale.
🟢 Green = must-have for a no-fuss launch. Definitely doable for early September.
🟡 Amber = nice-to-have, if time allows
đź”´ Red = cool ideas, but not happening this time
That gave me a clear, focused plan to launch on time—without losing sleep over the rest.
#BuildInPublic #GTM #Launch #Checklist
