Launch Your First Product Publicly

Define what 'launched' means before building

2–3 days. The document should take no longer than a day to write. If it takes longer, you are solving uncertainty about the product by writing more — stop and ship instead. The date you write on the document is the date you will launch.

Build the minimum that does the one thing

4–6 weeks. The product should be shippable in this time. If it is not, you are building too much. The constraint is the launch date from Milestone 1 — not when the product feels ready.

Get strangers to use it without your help

2 weeks after launch. If you hit 25 in the first 48 hours, you have a distribution channel that works — double down immediately. If you hit 0 after 14 days through all three channels, the distribution is the problem, not the product — document and pivot the channel strategy.

Measure whether it is working

30 days of observation. This milestone cannot be rushed — the data requires time to exist. Use the 30 days to talk to users, not to add features. Every conversation with a churned user is worth more than any feature you could build.

Document the launch and publish it publicly

3–5 days. The writing is the hard part. Most founders hate writing retrospectives because it requires admitting what did not work. The retrospectives that are most useful — to you and to others — are the ones that are most honest about failure.