Launch day gets the attention. It rarely earns it. Whatever you post that day reaches the handful of people who already follow you, plus whoever the feed decides to show it to, and if both groups are small the post does nothing. That is a scheduling problem, and you can only fix it in the two weeks before. On the morning itself it is already too late.
So here is the list we hand makers who ask what to do before they go public. Eight items, roughly in the order they tend to matter.
Say who it is for
Finish this sentence before you write anything else: this is for ___, and it hurts when ___.
If you can't finish it, the page will hedge, the launch post will hedge, and the first ten questions you get will all be some version of "who is this for?" That is the fastest way to waste a launch.
"Developers" is not an audience. Neither is "small businesses". The audience is the specific person whose week gets worse in a way your product makes smaller. If you can name two of them, you have your answer.
Write the origin story down
Why you, why this, and what you tried first that didn't work.
Two reasons to do it early. It is the part of your launch nobody can copy: anyone can repeat your feature list, no one else can repeat your reasons. And you will be asked the same question in every thread, DM and interview for the next year, so one written answer beats improvising it a hundred times.
Keep it short and unflattering. "I got tired of doing this by hand every Monday" beats "I have always been passionate about productivity". The version where the first attempt failed is more convincing than the one where everything clicked.
Put up a page and an account that look like someone is home
Two jobs that travel together: a presence on X (or wherever your people actually are), and one page that says what this is.
The page is a headline, a screenshot, a paragraph and one button. That is the whole thing. Not a feature grid, not a roadmap, not a wall of testimonials for a product with no users yet. Every extra block is another place for a visitor to lose the thread before reaching the button.
The account needs less than you think, but it needs to exist before launch day, not on it. If your handle is five years of unrelated replies, that timeline is not your launch audience. Posting there is still worth doing, just don't count on it to carry the announcement. Create the account or clean it up, make the bio the same plain sentence that is on your page, and follow the people you'd want to hear from. That is an afternoon of work, and it never gets more convenient later.
Pick a pace you can hold on a bad week
Announce a schedule you can keep when a release slips, or you're sick, or nothing happened that week. "Ship something every day" is a promise you break in week three, and silence after a loud start reads worse than a slow trickle.
One honest note a week beats a daily feed of "still working on it".
Write down what changed, not what you hope to ship
The habit that pays is the boring one: once a week, write down what actually moved, even when the answer is "spent the week on billing webhooks, nothing visible". A changelog line with a date on it is evidence that a real person is behind the project. Three of those in a row and people start checking back on their own.
Don't save them up for a big reveal. The reveal is for the day you have a reveal. The notes are what keeps the light on in between.
Post on day zero, then answer
There is no perfect day. Pick one, post the same day you decide, and stay in the replies.
The people who do well on launch day are almost never the ones with the best product. They are the ones who were already in the room, which is what the account, the page and the weekly notes were for. With those in place, the announcement has somewhere to land.
Then answer every comment yourself, in the first person, quickly.
Spend the same half hour every day
Twenty minutes of real replies does more than an hour of scrolling and liking: a question answered properly, a note on what you're building that speaks to someone else's problem. But it only works the way exercise works, which is a fixed slot every day rather than whenever you feel like it.
This is the last item, and it is the one that outlives the launch. The first seven are a two-week run-up. This one is the part you keep.
The list is not the work
None of this fixes a product nobody wants, and none of it is a growth trick. It is the minimum that makes a launch legible: someone knows what you made, why you made it, where to find it, and that you are still around next week.
The product still has to be good enough that the first twenty people who look come back. The list is only there so they see it at all.